Decompiling Oppression #149
Sam McVeety
On the eve of another Tuesday in November (four days to go!), I'm looking forward to a different annual tradition, which is Google's holiday giving week. Since 2020, my husband and I have made a yearly commitment to redistribute 20% or more of our total income to support building a more just world. This year, I want to invite you to join us in this practice, at a level that feels comfortable for you. We will be matching donations to support trans liberation at Lavender Rights Project, immigrant power building at OneAmerica, reproductive justice at Surge, and civic engagement at Washington Community Alliance.
I think it's important to share more about how we got here. When I first started at Google as a summer intern, it was one of the first substantial paychecks that I had ever received. Sure, I had worked assorted summer jobs during high school, but nothing that was going to extend much beyond some spending money. My family grew up comfortably middle class, but college was always going to mean taking out a bunch of loans. Having a truly disposable income was a new experience for me.
Alongside that income, I was excited to learn that Google matched donations up to a certain threshold: double the support to the community organization of your choice! I started taking advantage of this match over the ensuing years, and figured it was a good milestone when we started maxing it out (probably sometime in the early 2010s). The thing is, though: since the match is a flat amount, what started out as a sizable fraction of my salary became smaller over time. At the same time, we started learning more about different practices in philanthropy, and how a meaningful contribution might change over time.
Let's fast-forward a bit, to 2020, where we collectively held the hope of a racial uprising, the devastation of COVID, and the specter of a continued slide towards authoritarianism. A friend of ours, Jon Kauffman, urged people in his community to "run towards the fire" with their giving that year. So, we did; we took a deep look at our financial needs, and decided to do something scary: we gave away all of our salaries (cash + stock) that year. In retrospect, it's one of the best decisions we've ever made.
To be clear, I want to acknowledge the many privileges and advantages that enabled this moment for us. Among them are having family with access to affordable health care and not contending with spiralling costs of childcare and education. I share this story not as a gesture to create distance between you and me, but as an invitation, so that we might collectively ask what might be possible.
Indeed, it is such an urgent time to ask what might be possible. There are many ways to get stuck when it comes to giving; consider this your invitation to get un-stuck. One popular line of thought is that maximizing the effectiveness of each dollar is paramount, to which I would say: "yes, and..." Yes, and when we think about truly transforming the root causes of need, there are many ways to think about efficacy. At the height of a global pandemic, supporting local organizations meant that, at minimum, we were supporting the ongoing employment of key leaders in our community.
The thing with root causes is that they go deep. We need to tread with curiosity, whether we are looking at local challenges or if instead we're inclined towards the bigness of global problems. For example: if we want to truly talk about root causes of global poverty, we need to talk about predatory trade practices and the structural adjustment programs of the 1980s that decimated community support structures in the global south. Here in our present, we need to talk about how tens of billions of dollars have been cut from programs like USAID, imperiling millions of lives globally. When you consider that "only" a few billion dollars were spent on the 2024 election, doubling that to get a different outcome seems like it would have been a bargain.
There are many ways to give. Different parts of Christianity have been tithing for centuries, likewise for zakat in Islam. While I have listed organizations that are designated as 501c3s by the IRS, there is hugely important work happening beyond the c3 world (happy to talk about it; email me!) What I would offer is that it is less important where and how much you give, rather, I would invite you to give with intention and authenticity. There is no perfect strategy and there never will be. Just a deeply imperfect world, yearning for change.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: What is the first organization you gave money to? How did it feel?
Communal: How can we leverage our collective power to create deep, lasting change?
Solidarity: Support trans liberation at Lavender Rights Project, immigrant power building at OneAmerica, reproductive justice at Surge, and civic engagement at Washington Community Alliance.
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