Hi extended community,

We feel rage and grief over the health and housing crisis that is unfolding across our country. Everybody reading this message has immense privilege compared to the many BIPOC families in every major US city facing mid-winter eviction at the height of a deadly pandemic due to a racist system that marginalizes them. As Matthew Desmond writes in Evicted: “In poor black neighborhoods, what incarceration is to men, eviction is to women. [...] Poor black men are locked up; poor black women are locked out.”

Nevertheless, this crisis is cutting into our communities as well. Our cultural stigmas around money and privilege make it extremely hard for us to openly ask and offer material support to each other, even during this epochal societal breakdown.

In an effort to take action, we’re going to try something that we know will be imperfect, but that we hope will be better than not trying something. We want to give away at least $10,000 to people in our extended community who are struggling with basic expenses right now. At the same time, we are pledging to raise at least $10,000 from our personal networks to support marginalized people facing eviction in the US.

This Extended Community Relief fund is for anybody who is personally connected to us or connected to someone who knows us. You/they do not have to live in the Bay Area. Please forward this message to people you know for whom it might be relevant.

Do you worry about covering basic expenses over the next six months?

• Then this is an offer for you. We’d like to give you money. 

• Our culture can make it awkward/shameful to ask for money, even though there should be just as much shame in having money as in needing it. Know that if you take money from this fund, more money will go to support marginalized people facing eviction.

• We will give one grant to each requester. Grants will be at least $1,000.
  
  

Do you want to give money to people who need it?

• Then this is a request for you. Please make a pledge to us in whatever amount you can.

• When we give a grant from our Community Relief fund, we will call upon you to honor your pledge so that a matching grant is made.

• We request that you donate to one of these organizations: People Serving People (MN), Atlanta Mutual Aid, or Causa Justa :: Just Cause (SF/Oak). Of course, you can always suggest another org you know and love that fits the values of this project.

Please reply to us if you need a grant, if you’d like to make a matching pledge, or if you have feedback or suggestions on how we can do this in ways that are more effective or just.

With love,

Gideon & Miju

Q: How did we choose those organizations?

A: For Gideon, Matthew Desmond's 2016 book Evicted was as impactful as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Its lessons on housing "law" in the US are the main reasons he's been thinking about the housing side of the pandemic.