URGENT NEED B/C I’M SUPER LATE FUNDRAISING AS USUAL:
Whose Corner Is It Anyway,our #harmreduction & #mutualaid group by/for low-income #sexworkers who use drugs in W MA, is raising 10 K this month to keep services going through our revisioning hiatus and set something aside for the shitty fundraising months of Jan & Feb. As we look for more sustainable funding streams to be able to see the other side of this hiatus, it's imperative for us to be able to keep paying the homegrown, neighborhood sex worker leaders who make up our subcommittees some leave pay. It's similarly critical to be able to support our outreach coordinator's continuing rounds in the community during this time, bringing supplies to our most marginalized & vulnerable members & vouching for them to Lysistrata for emergency funds.
There are many exciting possibilities coming up for us-more collab w/local allies like Wildflower Alliance & out-of-state partners like ANSWER Detroit and NC Survivors Union. We're doing a focus group this month w/Baystate Emergency Department’s Elizabeth Schoenfeld on her Talk About It Project re methadone and buprenorphine induction in hospital. That’s a resource which, made more broadly available, would really improve the quality of our members’ lives when so many of their emergency department experiences have been so negative—putting them through withdrawal while they often faced medical neglect and mistreatment which ultimately had them leaving against medical advice, untreated.
(WCIIA subc member Madeline & I serve on the Talk About It study's steering committee. We also have some $ in the hiatus budget to pay members for otherwise unpaid speaking opportunities so we can continue to do other leadership capacity building.)
Most pressingly, tho,we need to support participatory grant writing as we figure out a sustainable financial route to continue in the long term. We can't abandon our community of 250 low-income sworkers experiencing housing insecurity & criminalization.
As I wrote in my last update, it's hard to admit needing a period of restructuring like this after 4 years of constantly expanding community-led work. Unfortunately, funding for drug user and sex worker organizing is still focused on elevating individual personalities for empty "representation" rather than sustaining entire communities. We can't leave service provision to professionalized outfits who don't know what we need like we do. As I point out ad naseam, hr service provision in Holyoke still means 1-1 syringe exchange in the year of our lord 2022, in the enlightened state of MA. And we can't keep grassroots community organizing completely under-resourced while systems of power only support one or two directly impacted people who can class pass from every community-the laziest interpretation of meaningful inclusion possible.
Please help WCII steer back to a pt where we can do community-staffed & needs-based harm redux, repro health, & survival supply provision; bailouts from lockup; safer bathrooms; sw decrim organizing; community designed & assembled safer smoking kits; etc etc etc. Thank you for everything you've done for us over these four years, esp. the donations & the consistent social media cheerleading. We're appealing to our loyal team to do some of that same posting & giving today.
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