In Pursuit of Radical Solidarity
When the pandemic hit and Congress and the Trump Administration decided to send a stimulus check to every U.S. American who made less than $99,000, they intentionally left out migrant families. This denial of much-needed support to anyone who is undocumented — as well as anyone (including citizens and documented folx) living in mixed-status households — was not because the U.S. doesn’t have plenty of resources to take care of all our people if we choose to. It was a political decision aimed at further othering migrant families and dividing Americans at a time when communities have been coming together to support each other like never before.
In the face of this racist and exclusionary decision, Sanctuary DMV, along with partner organizations, launched a stimulus check redistribution campaign aimed at engaging residents of the DMV in an act of political solidarity and radical mutuality. We asked our neighbors who anticipated receiving a stimulus check and didn’t need it — as well as those who wouldn’t receive one because they made too much money — to redistribute their funds to migrant families in the DMV. We set up a GoFundMe that has been successful beyond what any of us could have imagined — in the three months since we launched it, we have raised more than three quarters of a million dollars from nearly 3,000 donors, all of which has gone directly to migrants in the DMV — and the money continues to come in.
We believe the solidarity and mutuality we’ve seen in the DMV area over the last few months is both urgent and replicable.
What happened with our redistribution campaign is remarkable, but we do not think it is unique to DC, Maryland, and Virginia communities, nor do we think it was only possible because of the pandemic moment we are living. Rather, we believe we tapped into something that has always been there among us, and which we know will only be more critical in the months and years ahead. We believe we tapped into a deep desire to live in greater solidarity with one another, as well as a rejection of the exploitative capitalist system that has ravaged communities for centuries and created the conditions in which a global pandemic can have such unequal effects. Conditions that have been resisted for centuries by Black and Indigenous organizers across the U.S., and that sparked hundreds of thousands of people to rise in opposition to 400 years of racism and white supremacy.
We believe the solidarity and mutuality we’ve seen in the DMV area over the last few months is both urgent and replicable. We also know that Black and Indigenous folx and people of color have led the way in modeling radical solidarity and mutual aid as a means to challenge the current system of inequality and white supremacy and to build towards a more just world. The following are notes on how we put together a campaign that builds off this history of community organizing in the DMV area and has raised more than $750,000 (and counting), to aid folx in their own efforts to build the cultures of community and solidarity that we know are possible everywhere. It is organized by the key ingredients we believe have made us so successful: principles, partnerships, and good organization.
Principles
Solidarity, not charity
We do not believe that communities experiencing hunger, homelessness, and other adversity need our charity. In fact, the transactional, paternalistic cultures of charity endemic to western capitalist societies and the non-profit industrial complex are part of what has brought us to the dramatic levels of inequality we are currently experiencing. Instead, we need cultures of radical solidarity, in which we understand our interdependence with one another and see that we are not healthy and whole as a society until every member of our community has what they need, not just to survive, but to thrive. Within this framework, our acts of solidarity are acts of resistance that work against these systems designed to divide us by advantaging the few (white, middle class and wealthy people) and keeping down the rest (Black and Indigenous folx, people of color, poor and working class communities). At the same time, we recognize that a volunteer-driven redistribution effort is at best complementary to systemic change. Our GoFundMe campaign ran in parallel to an advocacy effort to pressure local governments to provide cash assistance to migrant families in order to fill the gap left by the federal government. An effort that was successful, as of yesterday! We used the redistribution campaign as a way to further organize donors to take action to support broader change.
Relationship-based redistribution
Because we knew the money we raised was never going to come close to meeting the need experienced by migrants in the DMV right now, we made the decision early-on to limit distribution of funds raised to those we are already in relationship with. This approach has also allowed us to strengthen our connections with individuals and families we already know, and who know us, and to build a foundation for deeper relationships and more intentional organizing. Some participating partners did open up funding to the broader community they serve, through open application processes. Depending on your organization, choose what works best for your community. We inevitably received a huge number of requests for assistance because of the publicity our campaign received. While we were unable to provide funds to all those requesters as a result of this principle and the limited funds available, we responded to each of them with a list of other possible resources and information about how to apply for formal government assistance (such as DC’s fund for excluded workers, which was created under pressure from community partners including our own organizations), where applicable.
Not arbiters of need
The challenges thrust upon migrant families in the DMV by the COVID-19 pandemic are tremendous, and they build upon challenges migrant communities have long faced due to extreme economic exclusion and exploitation by a racist, xenophobic, capitalist system. It is not for any collective or organization like Sanctuary DMV, which is made up predominantly of people not directly impacted by the immigration enforcement system, to determine whose need is greater or more urgent. While others who are in deeper relationships with impacted communities, or who are made up of migrants themselves, may be in a place to do more of this, Sanctuary DMV is not. Thus, we set an amount that we would redistribute consistently across the people we are in relationship with. This amount — $500 — allowed us to provide meaningful, if not entirely sufficient, support, while also reaching a significant number of community members. Other participating groups chose to redistribute their share of the funds raised in different amounts, from $300 to $1,000.
Partnership
Broadening our reach
Sanctuary DMV works with migrants from countries across the globe, but the majority of the folx we are in relationship with are originally from Latin America. These migrants make up a significant portion, but by no means all, of the DMV’s migrant population. To ensure our redistribution campaign reached a representative swath of the DMV’s diverse migrant community, we partnered with five local organizations or collectives, including a group led by Black migrants, one focused on the Muslim migrant community, and another working with migrant restaurant workers of various ethnicities and national origins. Participating groups include Justice for Muslims Collective, Many Languages One Voice, La ColectiVA, Restaurant Opportunities Center DC, and Sanctuary DMV. The DC-area chapter of UndocuBlack Network also nominated recipients of money from the fund, though for logistical reasons Sanctuary DMV distributed those funds on behalf of Undocublack.
Systemic change
Alongside partnering with groups that better represent the diversity of the DMV’s migrant population, we also prioritized partnerships with organizations that engage in organizing, advocacy, and other systems change work. While the main goal of the campaign was moving stimulus money as quickly and directly to migrants who were ineligible for it as possible, an additional important goal was capacity building for groups whose work strengthens communities by both meeting immediate needs and by pursuing changes to oppressive and exclusionary systems. As the GoFundMe campaign went on, we shared information about the organizing and advocacy work of each participating organization, so that contributors could plug into and amplify the efforts of these groups, beyond giving money.
Equitable partnerships
Each of the core partners collectively agreed to principles of the campaign before we launched the GoFundMe. These principles included each group sharing equally in the overall funds raised, redistributing 100 percent of funds raised directly to migrants in the DMV ineligible for stimulus checks as quickly as possible, and transparency in fundraising and distribution. No group had power over how any other group chose to distribute their funds, beyond these agreed principles. Additionally, we were open to the possibility of some groups not being able to commit to redistributing 100% of funds without taking overhead costs (we recognize that cost recovery is an important and too-often overlooked concern for formal organizations that need to pay their staff). However, all participating organizations willingly chose to commit to this principle — not least because many of us are informal volunteer or movement organizations without paid staff.
Organization & Logistics
Data security
In organizing with undocumented and mixed-status migrant communities, safety from the violent U.S. immigration system is of the utmost importance. Yet this effort also required that we have a significant amount of personal information in order to be able to distribute funds to recipients. As a result, we conducted all redistribution organizing over Signal, an end-to-end encrypted messaging service; private, paid account video conferencing; and offline documents and files that were never shared over email or on cloud-based data storage services.
Flexibility in money transfers
One of the consequences of living without formal status in the U.S. is limited access to financial institutions. This plays out in various ways in migrants’ lives, including the inability to open a bank account. Since many money transfer apps rely on a linked bank account, there were initial challenges getting money to the people it was designated for. Collectively our solutions have included:
- Utilizing cashiers checks, which can be cashed without a bank account
- Directly delivering cash to families (while practicing social distancing!)
- Supporting families to set up cashapp, a cash transfer system that can be used without a bank account
- Supplying visa gift cards
- When possible, we used personal checks, paypal, zelle or venmo
Honesty about capacity
This campaign has required a great deal of work and time from all participating organizations. At Sanctuary DMV, we have had extensive meetings to plan the campaign, to ensure implementation that sticks closely to our principles, and to triage challenges as they arise. We’ve been able to do all this, and quickly, because we have had 14 volunteer organizers dedicating several hours a week to this campaign — far more than the average grassroots group or organization would have. Even with this capacity, it has been difficult to receive, process, and distribute the amount of funds we received quickly. Processing a substantial amount of donations especially when they come in rapidly and without warning, as they have in response to the pandemic and the uprisings in support of Black lives, takes significant time and capacity. To mitigate this, you could also consider a system in which you can receive recurring monthly donations. Especially if you go for an all-at-once GoFundMe as we did, be honest with donors about your capacity and manage expectations up front about how quickly you can do the critical work of redistribution. You may also want to encourage folks to donate directly to individuals requesting support on social media or other platforms, especially in their local communities. Finally, as a group made up mainly of folx who are not directly affected by the U.S. immigration enforcement system, as donations started to roll in Sanctuary DMV offered to support partner organizations distributing funds, knowing that this could be a major capacity lift as partners also do their day-to-day community building and systemic change work.
If you take away one thing from our experience, it should be that there are countless people around us who have chosen solidarity over individualism. As this pandemic and economic recession goes on, if provided the opportunity, people will continue to show up for their community. As people receive tax returns and Congress considers another stimulus package, there are additional opportunities to channel solidarity into direct support for migrant families and others in need in your community. And those needs will remain well beyond this moment. Until we destroy capitalism and white supremacy, the continuous redistribution of wealth will be necessary. Through radical solidarity, we can move towards a more just future.
If you have further questions or want to chat about your own plans, feel free to reach out to us at sanctuarydmv2017@gmail.com.
Laura Williamson is an organizer with Sanctuary DMV, a rock climber, an experimental baker, and a North Carolinian who is proud to call DC home.
Sanctuary DMV is an all-volunteer solidarity collective resisting harmful policies & practices targeting migrants in DC, Maryland & Virginia. We are committed to abolition at every level, including the complete defunding and dismantling of immigration detention, jails, prisons, ICE, and the police.
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