january 2025 donation

my january donation was a special one! i was with a and g at books inc in berkeley and saw that they had a shelf dedicated to books requested by incarcerated folks. you could pick a book (or more) and the bookstore would donate the books through the Prisoners Literature Project. there are a lot of rules about what goes in and out of prisons, so a regular person is generally unable to personally donate books. 

i LOVE this idea!! not only would i be supporting a local and independent bookseller, but i would also be helping some incarcerated people. plus, there were actually requested books, not just stuff that i thought people might like to read. and even better? a lot of the books were on sale!! hahaha, so i picked three books that made up about my usual $25 donation and purchased them to donate.

this donation is especially meaningful to me because j and i have been listening a lot to ear hustle, a podcast out of san quentin state prison that interviews currently and previously incarcerated people to talk about life both inside and outside prison. g introduced it to me many years ago, and while i did like it, this kind of storytelling podcast isn't really my thing so i kind of forgot about it for a while. then, somewhere along our cross country road trip from boston to la, i was running out of our regular podcasts and remembered this on. j likes the moth so i figured he might like this one, and lo and behold, he does. :)

matchy matchy

podcast - articles of interest - chromophobia

the whole podcast was interesting but the first bit, especially so. avery talks to a man who blind, but he dresses in colors and has a person create outfits for him. it's so interesting! at first i was like, would i care enough about other people to try to match my clothes? i would like to say that i would wear things that *feel* good (corduroy, silk, velvet, etc.) regardless of anything else, but who knows? i might try to keep to a neutral or black/white/grey palette so that i don't clash too much. not that i could see it, but i guess it might bother others and i would probably care because, well, most of us just don't want to stand out too much.

j has been trying to change up his style lately. he's gotten into the look of a chore jacket and has also started wearing gold chains, and occasionally a neckerchief. he's also taken to wearing beater tanks as undershirts (mostly because t shirts have crew necks which can visually interfere with neck accessories), but in the whole time we've been together i think i've seen him in a sleeveless shirt maybe twice, lol, so it's different!

i've also been thinking about my look. mostly cause we're planning to move soon and i won't be able to bring so much clothes. also, on my trip to tennessee with the girls, i noticed so they all looked pretty good, whereas i mostly wore my schleppy travel clothes. i'm leaning towards more collared shirts. i actually really like the style of jenna lyons who was the creative director of j crew for a number of  years. i've always liked the preppy look, but in the last few years have really given into gorpcore, which i still like, but it's mostly synthetic materials which i'm trying to get away from.

anyway, back to the beginning of the post. how do you think you would dress if you were blind?

october 2023 donation

 

this month i donated to radiotopia. i mostly only listen to articles of interest, which isn't my most favorite podcast or anything, but i do really like it, and also, honestly, i just love podcasts! how did i only start listening to these a few years ago! oh man have i missed out, lol.

also, i'm realizing the importance of independent media, especially when it comes to news, but certainly for everything else as well.

june 2023 donation

this month I donated to LA ist, which I only recently found out has a local radio station! I know I'd visited their website before, though not too often. but anyway, they also play NPR which I'm a big fan of altho, honestly, I don't really listen to too much, lol, since I have my many podcasts to get through. though some of my favorite podcasts are from NPR. it's kind of strange, I think, how little I used to listen to public radio since it totally seems like my kind of thing, but anyway, j listens to it all the time so that's where I developed more of an appreciation for it. 

march 2023 donation

this month i donated to NPR because they had a huge budget shortfall and are laying people off, ending a bunch of podcasts, etc. it's horrible. it turns out also, that when you search "npr donation" you are given two options, to donate to NPR itself to a local member station. I don't actually listen much to KCRW, our local NPR partner station, but i do listen to a few NPR podcasts, so I donated to NPR itself. ...i'll probably donate to them again later this year, honestly, because I think NPR is important.

some of their podcasts I listen to:
throughline (one of my favorite podcasts)
rough translation
invisibilia (tho i preferred older seasons)

april 2022 donation

this month I gave 25 euro to Women On Waves which is a dutch non-profit that provides abortion pills to people around the world (including those in america). I found out about them thru AidAccess which was talked about in The Atlantic's podcase The Experiment. 

this is the second month in a row i've given to an abortion org, and from that podcast, I was introduced to a few more great abortion orgs so who knows, this might be my give focus this year.

project prevention

one my most favorite podcasts recently replayed an old episode called Inheritance. i was specifically interested in the third section called: What If There Was No Destiny? it centers on barbara, a woman who adopted multiple children from another woman who was giving them up near annually, as soon as they were born. this woman was addicted to drugs and her children would all likely be affected, physically and mentally, because of it. she had three prior children to the four barbara had adopted also. all had given up for adoption. 

after adopting the fourth child, barbara founded a non-profit called Project Prevention, which pays women with drug addictions to get IUDs or get sterilized. 

obviously, this is a pretty controversial org! the money ($300-$400) is given without any drug prevention care. it's just given if the woman gets an IUD or sterilization. it's not given *for* the woman, you see. it's given to prevent more "drug addicted babies."

there are racial implications, of course, especially because barbara is white. altho she does say that the majority of the women who accept are white. (tho what's the breakdown of women they're approaching?)  and you have to wonder if there's any coercion, especially when it comes to sterilization. but it's an interesting idea.

i don't have solid opinions about this org but i will say that i don't intend to donate to them. that may change, but barbara used some rather offensive (and umempathetic) language when describing some of these women and it seems like the org is very strongly driven by her vision alone, rather than by a board, which also makes me uncomfortable.

give well

while listening to 99% invisible recently (great podcast, btw), i've been hearing adds for givewell.org, a non-profit which rates other non-profits mostly based on the "maximum impact" of your gift. basically, how of your donated dollar actually goes to programming rather than overhead.

I think this is a great idea, but as a person working in non-profit, i have to caution over emphasizing this single metric. i say this over and over, but you should want to pay overhead. overhead includes staff pay, insurance, rent, utilities, office supplies, and all sorts of shit including stuff you would rather not pay for, but ultimately, is necessary. of course, orgs shouldn't waste your money, and a large majority of your donated funds should go to programming, but efficiency of your dollar should not be the greatest metric you're using when judging whether or not to donate.

all that being said, I was happily surprised to see that givewell recommends givedirectly as one of their top charities. they seem to only recommend about 10 or so non-profits a year, so it's pretty dope they recommend an org that i recently discovered and really like as well.

you should look into give well and see if they align with your giving philosophies. their giving priorities are not mine, since most of theirs are medical science stuff done overseas because medical stuff dierectly affects lives (and is an easier metric to calculate) and donating overseas to poorer nations means your dollars go further. still, medical stuff is of less interest to me. but I think they're doing really great work in pooling their donations and giving directly to the orgs they think have maximum impact. they seem very thorough in their research and also very transparent in their reporting.

give directly

I occasionally listen to the podcast econtalk. not often tho, because it's pretty academic so I often don't know what theories they're referring to. but I did listen to one recently about givedirectly.org. the podcast interviewed the two guys who started givedirecly, and why they did it, what they've accomplished, and what they're trying to accomplish still. 

givedirectly is really interesting because it's like privately funded UBI in other countries where the impact is greater. giving an american $500 to spend on whatever they want doesn't get them very much: food for the month, school supplies, a car payment, but certainly not rent. give a non-urban area dwelling kenyan $500 and they can send multiple kids to school for a year, or start a whole business, or build a small house.

it's similar to kiva, in that way, sort of. encouraging the idea that smaller amounts money pooled from donors in wealthy countries can create an outsize impact on poorer areas. but better than kiva, is that it's free money, AND they don't have to justify a damn thing. 

as someone who works in non-profit, i love donations. but i LOVE unrestricted donations. even better? large unsolicited unrestricted donations! that's what this is. the givedirectly people go from town to town asking people if they want free money. sometimes people say no (because it sounds too good to be true!). often times they say yes. eventually they get the money deposited to a digital wallet, which they withdraw from, and spend it on whatever they want. the givedirectly people follow up about what they spent on, and such, for research and accountability purposes, but there's not supposed to be judgement. because, well, people know their own needs best.

I think I'll be donating to kiva whatever balance I get back from them, since it's a micro-lending org. and instead give to give directly more often because it better aligns with my values. I never really cared to get the kiva money back anyway. 

gender

Podcast: Knowledge Gaps in Intersex Health Care (undark.org)

I always thought that if I had kids I'd want to raise them fairly gender neutral. I would allow them to decide what they want to wear, play with, participate in. tho I admit, I will cringe my little girl will only wear pink and play with dolls, or if my little boy only wants to play with guns and wear camo. 

this extends to if i had an intersex child. unless it was medically necessary, I wouldn't want to have my child undergo gender "assignment" surgery. like, what if I make the wrong decision? what if I choose for my child to be a boy and they grow up feeling like a girl? or what if they never want to choose? ugh. no thanks. kid, you can decide and I'll support you no matter what.

I understand that childhood will be much harder for an intersex kid. for some reason people are obsessed with sex and gender. people apologize to me and roux when they mislabel him as a girl. like, what difference does it make? least of all to him! but I think being honest with my child, and allowing them to make their own decisions is the most respectful thing I can do. this is their life and I don't think I should be able to, basically unilaterally, decide this for them.

december 2020 donation

this month I donated to Radiolab, my all-time favorite podcast. it covers an expanse of topics, has interesting guests, and is well edited. I hesitate to list any favorite episodes because I haven't heard a bad one yet. tho, it was The Other Latif series that really got me into this podcast.

one sentence

Radiolab episode The Cataclysm Sentence was about Richard Feynman on the One Sentence to Be Passed on to the Next Generation, which was "If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied." 

the hosts asked a bunch of people the same question and they got all sorts of answers including stuff about fear, about God, about race. honestly, mostly dumb stuff that aliens wouldn't care about because these things are too specifically human.

I thought a good answer was from writer Jenny Holwell: "Everything is connected." she said about it: "to me that feels like a sentence that contains an element of scientific truth, but also inspires us to believe in it. Because I do think that whatever we leave behind needs to contain something about it that would inspire the finder to believe in it."

before I heard her sentence I was thinking mine might be something along the lines of "no matter how much you want it to be untrue, basically, nothing you do matters." which is... fucking dismal, lol. I like Jenny's thought that it should inspire the finder. so I added another sentence.

"No matter how much you try, basically, nothing you do means anything. But don't try too hard to disprove this."