I challenge you! I will double your donation to support prison abolition, relief efforts in Beirut, Black liberation, or low-income immigrant communities.
I’m offering up three small artist fees totaling $325 to match your donations. The fees are from three projects:
- a poster about colluding against racist immigration detention tactics at Angel Island, which appears in the just-published second edition of Celebrate People’s History
- Messages for the City, public artworks thanking essential workers, which will appear somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line, TBA.
- a recent talk with the San Francisco Center for the Book, in conjunction with Poetry Is Not a Luxury, which includes Miné Okubo’s illustrations of her life in the Tanforan assembly center in San Bruno, CA and the Topaz concentration camp in Utah.
How to participate:
Step 1. Donate…
…to abolish the prison industrial complex…
…to relief efforts in Beirut…
a manmade humanitarian disaster
Impact Lebanon’s disaster relief fund. Impact Lebanon is a non-profit organization based in the UK dedicated to supporting Lebanese people worldwide.
Children’s Cancer Center of Lebanon’s rescue fund.
…to support BLM activists targeted by police…
Such as the Wichita DSA bail fund…
…or to address food insecurity in immigrant neighborhoods in NYC.
In NYC, poor Black and brown neighborhoods suffered the highest rates of infection and death from the coronavirus. In Corona, over half of antibody tests were positive. Some of those same neighborhoods are now experiencing disproportionate rates of job losses. Donate to:
La Jornada Food Pantry in Elmhurst/Corona, Queens
La Jornada has been supplying the local community with over 1,450 meals weekly, with space donated by the Queens Museum since mid-June. Donate via Paypal at lajornadany.org (if you don’t have Paypal, you can Venmo me.)
Send Chinatown Love’s Gift-a-Meal in Flushing and Brooklyn Chinatown
For only $5, you can feed youth or seniors in need while helping a small, immigrant-run business stay afloat. Donate at https://www.gofundme.com/f/gift-a-meal.
2. Email me a confirmation of your donation.
You can email me at cwy@christinewongyap.com. Donations must be between August 19–23, 2020.
3. I’ll match the donations, up to $325 total.
I’ll post screenshots of matching donations on Instagram.
Bonus Challenge: Take this idea and run with it!
Artists, I challenge you to create your own micro challenge match with your artist’s fees (or just donate them directly to good causes) if you are in a position to do so.
Yes, artist’s fees are important, and all artists should be paid for their labor.
Yes, a lot of artists are precarious and don’t have health insurance even in ‘normal’ times, and are especially precarious now.
And… if one is White or East Asian, employed or financially stable, documented, insured, able-bodied, cis, housed, and/or educated, one can be precarious and privileged. Precarity and privilege are not mutually exclusive.
Thank you for inspiration, reminders, call-ins, info sharing, and motivation: Margo Okazawa-Rey (be humble and think abundantly), Armando Minjarez, Brian Zegeer, and Maymanah Farahat. Thanks for paying artists, Josh MacPhee/Just Seeds, SFCB, For Freedoms.
R+D 