When my life is no longer a priority funding issue: A love letter and a thank you note to resource organizers

By Aileen “AJ” Joy, Director of Resource Organizing and Organizational Development, Tenants Together

My story is not an unfamiliar story right now, and I still want to send out my little story with love and gratitude and resistance to all my comrade resource organizers living through this. Triggers in this article include: intimate partner violence, housing insecurity, addiction, untimely death.

Like resource organizers have always known, the interest of those with money and class privilege comes and goes, but the work continues. I know the work we do matters, and I am grateful that I get to do it with you.

Dear resource organizers,

I have worked, paid and unpaid, for over a dozen years in tenant rights, anti-displacement, and housing in California. 

Way before that, I was a kid in San Francisco whose family got displaced to the suburbs when our home was sold to a large landlord and a fire damaged part of it. 

That move cost us a lot as a family. 

Like many people the world over (and definitely many of us from my beloved Bay Area), our family was made by lots of ties, both chosen and blood. A stable home and proximity to each other strengthened our connections and capacity to care. 

Being displaced from our neighborhood in the late nineties and early naughties, as a teen, caused a ripple effect in my family of those “poor health outcomes” the nonprofit industrial complex claims to want to prevent: addiction, toxic levels of stress and all kinds of mental health crises, loneliness, and shortened lifespans. 

Again, as an adult, the cost of housing in the Bay Area kept me in violent or toxic relationships, but community-controlled and created social housing solutions enabled me to get free from the cycle of domestic violence. 

I say a big thank you, with my words and my actions, to the legacy of organizers—largely BIPOC, queer, working class, and femme—who created the dynamics and structural capacity—like rent control, harm reduction, community land trusts, and complex webs of care among organizers—for me to be free. 

And now? Now…sigh. 

Among all the values and communities and beloveds being attacked, I am also hearing from some funders that housing is no longer a priority issue in their portfolios. Housing is not a part of their future public health grantmaking; they did a brief experiment in race equity and housing funding, but now they are moving on. 

These responses break my heart, and they will cause real harm. 

Very few funders to begin with funded the kind of BIPOC-led, scalable, cost-effective, and proven solution to housing insecurity tenant organizing that organizations like Tenants Together, where I work, have done for decades. 

De-resourcing and de-staffing anti-displacement work will create conditions for more evictions, more homelessness, more harassment of community members in the home (as landlords and others increasingly seek to use ICE to intimidate community members where we live), and therefore more illness and death. 

Don’t believe me? As LeVar Burton told me as a tiny millennial, “You don’t have to take my word for it.” Check out this peer-reviewed study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research that found that lives are cut short from evictions—whether they’re connected to the ongoing COVID pandemic or not—far too often. 

In the past six months, Tenants Together—California’s statewide organization for renter rights—lost a significant portion of our budget due to “anti-DEI” (pro-segregation) funder sentiment, funders defunding housing as a public health strategy, and more symptoms of this moment. I have never written more grants or asked for more in my life, all while I was on partial furlough and my stepparent was dying. 

I know so many of you are facing this and more, and are hearing everyday funding and policy decisions that seek to tell us that we, our stories, and our lived experiences do not matter. 

For me, as a survivor, this opens up old, deep wounds of gaslighting, dismissal, and profound unsafety.  

If you feel this too, resource organizers, I just want to say that I love you, I believe you, and I thank you for how you have showed up as a community for me, throughout my career and in this current funding environment. 

When the funder or policy gaslighting gets to be too much for me (like right now, when another budget cut hits, or when I hear another organization I love dearly is facing lay-offs, furloughs, or closure), I cry, I despair, and I also try to do some of these things for myself:

1. Rightsizing my assessment of the threat to us and acting where I can. I hold so much fear and heartache now, but I learned from my survival how to live with some of these big feelings. First, I find spaces where I do not have to live my fear or sadness alone. I find comrades (more below) and trusted healers to navigate the defunding and other attacks with me.I then investigate where I have privilege (as a white person who has always been in the more “middle” side of working class) and where I have risk (as a queer nonbinary and disabled survivor). In so many spaces, I am less at risk than colleagues, and I can use this to step up or step back as the situation needs.

    

   I use my position of leadership in movement (and my fundraising skill set) to ensure we continue to have access to growing amounts of paid PTO and better than industry standard benefits (including flex funds for culturally meaningful care or otherwise uncovered therapy). As funding continues to be threatened, the fight to protect our well-being as organizers will deepen; I am here for it with you.

2. Taking time away from screens and the hustle to rest and recharge. The work of Tricia Hersey has been very inspiring to me and many colleagues in the trenches out here. By resting, small periods each day and also for days or a week at a time (after longer sprints for funding), I am more able to respond to a landscape that changes quickly.
   
   Survivorship has taken real tolls on my body, which I will not detail here, but rest has made it possible for me to continue this work, skillfully and with creativity and care for comrades.
3. Deepening my listening to mentors. I am seeking this information from deep conversation with partners, other community members, and national coalition partners tracking the trends right now.
   
   As a movement, we know a lot about resistance, in this time and in all the times before.
   
   Not a comprehensive list, but I never want to waste an opportunity to thank Steve Lew of Compass Point, Lisa Schottenfeld of Seed the Vote (where I volunteer as a resource organizer), Mario Lugay of Justice Funders, my colleagues at Tenants Together, and so many of the staff and members of our national partners at Right to the City for leading with your combined decades of deep wisdom, kindness, love, dedication, and humor. Spending time with you all the last few years has really grounded this work for me. 

Like resource organizers have always known, the interest of those with money and class privilege comes and goes, but the work continues. I know the work we do matters, and I am grateful that I get to do it with you.

In solidarity,

Aileen “AJ” Joy