Home Info Accountability Statement & Guidelines Who pays for this? Where does the money go?

Who pays for this? Where does the money go?

via Ashia
sankey chart of 2021 income & spending

[Image: Sankey chart of my income, expenses, and contributions for 2020, generated via Sankeymatic. See more details on that below.]

Raising Luminaries [RL for short] supporters, readers, and contributors (including the founder of RL and author of this statement, Ashia R.) are responsible for transparent and clearly stated missions, objectives, goals, and procedures. Check out our Accountability Guidelines for more info.

Why this Statement of Financial Stuff exists:

We live in a capitalist society (for now, mwhahahahAh!) and money gives/takes a form of power and privilege. By maintaining foundational honesty, our readers and supporters can easily identify who has financial influence over our goings-on, and how I spend those generous contributions.

Objectives

The objectives of RL financially, in no particular order of priority (I am still wrestling with this!)

  • For humanity: Provide as much work as I can to be accessible freely for folks who need it to smash the kyriarchy but can’t afford a paywall, and to make enough money to keep it sustainable while I support my family.
  • For my family: To eventually cover our living expenses and not have my work be a financial (and by extension, emotional and safety) drain on my children, partner, and our parents and community members who rely on us.
  • For my ego: I’m trying real hard to let go of the idea that my value is a human and my contributions to society are tied to how much people are willing to pay me in cold hard cash, but it’s gonna take a while. Patience, please.

How I measure success

I currently track the following to gauge the success of RL’s financial sustainability:

  • Patreon support (mostly number of contributing patrons, but I can’t pretend I’m not paying rapt attention to the monthly totals of contributions)
  • Proportion of higher-tier supporters to lower-tier supporters.
  • Proportion of people who support for locked content versus altruism to keep RL free for those who can’t afford to contribute.
  • Reasons why people opt to contribute to RL, and reasons why people discontinue monthly contributions.

Who covers my costs of labor?

Current contributors

The following contributes to the expenses of running BFL including website maintenance, software, and supplies. As of this writing in 2020:

Former contributors & income streams:

(2019 and previous)

  • Solidarity Machine: T-shirt shop run by the lovely David Beasley. It’s currently closed because he’s working on other cool stuff.
  • Googlesense ads: I discontinued this because keeping an eye out for problematic ads was a pain, and not worth it for the roughly $30 bucks a year.
  • My brother-in-law covered website hosting for the first year-and-a-half until this site started to get tons of traffic and doxx threats – now I pay for a more secure host.
  • From spring of 2018 through winter 2019, my father traveled abroad after retiring, and I used the car he left behind for trips to the library
  • Before she got overwhelmed with other care-taking duties, we would get free babysitting from my mom a few times a year when she will take them for 8 hours or overnight.
  • Nathan S Ray (see above) covered my out-of-pocket expenses and costs of running Raising Luminaries & Books For Littles from 2014-2019 until I started making enough to cover my expenses.

Who benefits from all this, financially?

For non-financial beneficiaries, check out the main accountability guidelines.

Why is it important to financially contribute to marginalized groups and #OwnVoices activists if don’t yet make a living wage from running this?

None of us deserves to eat until all of us have a place at the table. Our supporters pay me to write about, say, racism – because racism is still an urgent problem.

It’s unethical of me to (one day, hopefully) make a living off the problem of racism without actively working to dismantle racism. Same for decolonizing, fighting wealth inequality, advocating for refugee & immigrant rights, etc. I benefit from the oppression of marginalized groups, and being a disabled woman of color doesn’t absolve me of the responsibility to fight with everything I have (and even the things I don’t have).
So, before I start shooting for the goal of making minimum wage, I FIRST have to make sure I’m giving back and lifting others alongside me.
I can’t steal a camera and start a portrait business, promising to pay for it after I’ve turned a profit. That would be crappy of me. I can’t boost issues I’ve learned about from other folks without giving them credit, boosting them higher, and if/when I can afford it, paying them for their expertise and labor.
AND – if you’re a patreon membership, you should be aware that I do support controversial, radically progressive #OwnVoices organizations. Maybe you’d be uncomfortable with me supporting a specific organization.
If so, let’s talk about it. I’m interested to hear your take. Unless it’s like ‘a potential male blastocyst has more rights than a uterus-haver’s life’ or ‘supporting Black rights is anti-White.’
In which case, eww. Bye.

Income & Expenses by Year:

2020 Ins & Outs

sankey chart of 2021 income & spending

sankey chart of 2021 income & spending

2020 Financial Beneficiaries (folks I sent money to)

Each year as they get older, I gave the Earthquakes more discretion on where to donate our income. As the next generation inheriting our earth, they get approval and veto power on our donations, as well.

Because I can’t count on steady income from affiliate & consultations, I based my contribution budget on slightly-more-stable expected patreon income, aiming to reinvest 10%+ of my post-tax patreon checks back into the community.

I ended up donating about 45% of my post-tax patreon income, which turned out to be about 34% of my net take-home salary overall. This inflated rate is due in part to this being my first year having enough to take home and pay some bills, on top of the fact that 2020 was a horrible shit-show of a year, and everyone, everywhere, needed help.

But in 2021 I will NOT be able to live on 16k/year, and will donate on a more sustainable sliding scale – in reasonable proportion to what I earn.

2021 Income

Affiliate links

OF COURSE, this first year when all that fiddling with Amazon affiliate links finally pays off, it’s gotta be the same year we make the moral decision to switch to Bookshop affiliate links. The 360% surge over last year came from everyone shopping online during the pandemic (I don’t just get a cut of amazon books, I also get a cut of whatever you order when you click through my links.) So I expect to lose this income as all of our new posts moving forward will contain Bookshop links whenever possible.

Patreon contributions

Despite losing a lot of patreon support this year due to members of our community hit hard by the pandemic, patreon support stayed pretty steady. The rate of new contributors dropped significantly (obvs, we’re in a recession), and it has been unpleasant and scary knowing that I’m still relying on the kindness of a little under 350 people to keep contributing for stuff I’m already giving away for free. But our community remains rock-steady – and rest assured that if you had to discontinue your support this year due to hardship, you’re still a solid, important part of our community who contributes by caring for your family and doing the work in other ways.

You can actually see the stats for our patreon popularity over on Graphtreon. Try to avoid the ‘top creators’ list, as it will send you into a spiral of despair to see how much more people are willing to pay for misogynistic cartoons, quick-takes, and sloppy-researched history lessons by white dudes on the youtubes.

It’s hard to justify not donating everything I have, because look at the numbers! Less than 400 people actually believe this work makes a difference enough to support it. So while it makes no logical sense, it’s hard to say, ‘Yes I deserve to be paid and keep the money I earn’ when we have so few people voting with their dollars toward that message. So until I can create something awesome enough that folks want to support RL more than say, podcasts about wealthy dude problems or fan art featuring naked cartoons, it feels like a moral imperative to re-invest huge portions of my earnings so long as I have shelter and meals available.

2021 Expenses

There’s the obvious stuff, like taxes, accounting, office supplies.

This was the first year I didn’t squeak by with just enough to pay our income tax. We started paying down the childcare debt I took on in 2018 to pay for childcare so I could work (see below), paying 20% of that debt down.

‘Office & studio space’ means – the kids are now home 24/7 during the pandemic, I have an auditory sensory disability, so I installed a lot of sound baffling to absorb the screams (both the Earthquakes, and mine). We’ve also had to start homeschooling, which means paying for more paper, drawing supplies, a big glass board, and paint and lights to convert our old room into a home-school room so they can focus during lessons.

‘Marketing’ is a Little Free Library I purchased so I could share all the books publishers have been sending to me for review. Seems a waste to just keep them to myself.

And this year, I actually contributed to our family by paying for a portion of our housing and food. Huzzah! Thank you, friends, for making this possible, and keeping us pushing for another year.

 

2019 Beneficiaries & Contributors

Financial Beneficiaries (folks I donated money to:)

  • ACLU (civil rights)
  • Adamma A. Ison Family Fundraiser – Emergency medical support for a family who can’t afford care. I normally don’t do personal funds, but it’s in honor of Carly MH, who helped me with the Decolonizing Childhood Coalition project this summer 🙂
  • Autism Women’s Network‘s microgrant program for autistic women & nonbinary people (disability, gender & wealth inequality)
  • Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective
  • Bellamy Shoffner: Anti-racism education for children
  • Black Girl In Maine: Anti-racism education for white people
  • The Broke-Ass Transwoman: Sexism & trans rights & education, often at the intersection of being a Black woman (full disclosure for nepotism: this is my step-sister.)
  • Disability Visibility Project Via Alice Wong on Patreon: Advocacy for disability rights & representation
  • Donors Choose & local public schools: Classroom supplies for students because our broken system won’t allow tax dollars to pay for school computers and necessary curriculum supplies. Support your local public schools, folks! And then match that donation for a student in a local school in an area with a lower household median income. Conservative nincompoopery works around equity funding to ensure that schools with white, wealthy families can use private donations for things like school library books, computers, and basketballs, which makes it hard for underfunded schools to apply for tax-based support for the same things.
  • Families Belong Together (Immigrant rights)
  • First Light Foundation Wampanoag educator, Annawon Weeden, whom I sponsored to come educate local families (Families Organizing for Racial Justice) about the real history of Thanksgiving & colonization.
  • HEARD – Helping Educate to Advance the Rights of Deaf Communities
  • Immigrant Families Together: Support for immigrant families, in coordination with The Decolonizing Childhood Coalition, spearheaded by Wee The People this summer, in coordination with our Immigrant Solidarity Toolkit.
  • International Indigenous Youth Council: Redirected 50% of our venmo donations for photocopies to this organization run by and for indigenous youth for self-advocacy, in honor of our Dean of Rebellious Educators, April B. who collaborated with me on our Student Ignition Society Immigrant Solidarity Toolkit.
  • Karam Foundation: Refugee relief & support, in honor of my bud Monica R., who knows lots of stuff about body sovereignty and whose work helps our members cultivate a culture of consent with our kids
  • Latimer Family Foundation: Personal fundraiser to help an Indigenous LGBQTiA2S+ family with disabilities make ends meet while getting through a SSI glitch. Again, normally I don’t do personal funds, but this person has been a supportive member of the BIPOC autistic community and has personally helped me learn about and navigate discrimination in the IEP process for neurodiverse kids in public schools.
  • Liberation Library: Providing requested books to youth in prison
  • Lydia X. Z. Brown Social Justice Advocacy & Neurodiversity rights leader educating about trans-racial adoption, disability, and gender education.
  • Mass(achusetts) Bail Out: Bail funds to end wealth-based detention
  • Morénike Onaiwu: Support for a Black disabled adoptive family for leader of the Neurodiversity movement who is about to lose her family home. She gets attacked on the reg, for everything pertaining to existing, and we should support her right to be.
  • Movimiento Cosecha: Immigrant Rights
  • National ADAPT (Disability rights)
  • Planned Parenthood (healthcare)
  • Ramp Your Voice!: Disability rights for Black women
  • Seeding Sovereignty: Indigenous Advocacy
  • Tamika Olszewski Election Committee: Local school committee member diversifying an overwhelmingly white administration (now serving), whose opposition promotes Islamophobia and whitewashing school curriculum and promotes funding equity and racial justice within our city schools
  • Tip jars for organizations and programmers who experiment and rely on interdependence & anti-capitalism
    • Rowan of CrossKnit: Time-saving services. Normally money shouldn’t flow toward whiteness, but I’ve used this white-whisperer link as a quick resource to collect white & allistic nonsense a handful of times over the years, so I bought her a few coffees in thanks for saving me that time and emotional labor.
    • 5 Calls & Resistbot: Both of these make referencing legislation & contacting my reps an easy part of my morning routine
    • Add-on tips for Go Fund Me so recipients don’t have to pay for processing fees.
  • UAINE (United American Indians of New England): Indigenous rights & representation advocacy
  • We Free Black Mamas: Bail funds to end wealth-based detention of Black Mothers, in coordination with Wee The People
  • Wôpanaâk Language Reclamation Project Redirected 50% of our venmo donations for photocopies to the WLRP run by and for Wampanoag members to reclaim language lost through violence, land theft, and forced assimilation.
  • Using income I accrued outside of RL (credit card rewards, family research studies), I used digital these credits to buy books created by makers whose work I’d like to support, incuding Zetta Elliott, Mike Jung, Maris Wicks, Della Goldsworth, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  • Cash donations for local fundraisers – such as an Asian woman-owned startup in an overwhelmingly white town, unhomed folks, and a youth of color struggling to get out of an exploitative work environment.
  • National Network of Abortion Funds
  • RAICES (legal assistance for minor immigrants)
  • Our family’s Amazon smile beneficiary is set to Charity Water

2019 Budget:

sankey chart 2019 income & expenses

[Image: A Sankey chart showing gross income and expenses for running Raising Luminaries in 2019]

Quick rundown:

Gross income: $30,003.69

Net Income: $4603.48 (or maybe that will go to taxes, which I haven’t calculated yet. Probably taxes)

  • 73.31% from Patreon contributors
  • 12.80% from the Amazon affiliate program
  • 12.50% Consulting & speaking fees – I’m not sure if this should count towards RL income since this is above-and-beyond stuff I’m doing for individuals and organizations to pay for groceries. So I might not count it here next year. We’ll see.
  • <1% One-time contributions (venmo, paypal)
  • <1% Google ads payout from 2017-2019 (I discontinued ads on the site as soon as I hit the minimum payout balance.)
  • <1% Solidarity Machine contributions

Total Expenses:

  • 53.74% for childcare
    This is mandatory so I can work. We wouldn’t need summer camp if I wasn’t running RL. So I count it as an expense here.
  • 15.35% ($4603.48) is maybe my take-home income? I am super excited about this, it’s my first year making an income! But also nervous because I haven’t filed taxes yet and odds are all of it are actually just taxes I haven’t paid yet. We’ll see in April 2020!
  • 9.24% for office space
    This is a one-time expense. I’ve been operating RL for years out of a tiny nook in my bedroom (24×36″ wide with a crouching-ceiling). The papers, books, technology, and office supplies I need were under constant threat from grabby Little Earthquake hands and the cramped space was starting to damage both my eyesight and my back (I have scoliosis. And I am getting old). Since this is the first year RL wasn’t a drain on my family’s finances, I spent $2.771.21 to fix up a tiny room in our house with a broken floor and wiggly electrical into a space with a door that locks, a floor that doesn’t buckle, and electrical wires that won’t kill me. It’s so nice in here now! I’m getting much better work done and my back feels better. Thank you, patrons!
  • 7.37% Taxes
    I had to pay that were leftover from 2018 income. I know this should be in last year’s budget, but I don’t even know how I would do that. It’s probably higher for that this year since I actually made more than I spent this year.
  • 7.16% (31.80% of discretionary income)
    contributions to #OwnVoices activists & orgs. I know 7% looks small. Keep in mind that my actual take-home income was the 4,603.48 for the entire year. Some of that will go to taxes, once I calculate and file them. And many of our contributions are not tax-deductible because we fund grassroots folks who can’t afford to register as a nonprofit. The actual percentage of contributions from that discretionary cash I have left over is closer to 31.8%. This isn’t sustainable forever, so please don’t get upset if I don’t donate 31.8% of my net income next year and this number continues to go down.
  • 2.50% Accounting
    This feels wasteful – but. I work for myself and all of this is super complicated and I don’t want to go to jail for filing the wrong numbers!
  • 2.06% on books & supplies
    Books I need to test but can’t get at the library, paper clips, printer paper, pens, clipboards, that kind of stuff.
  • <2% Software & hosting for the website
  • <1% Postage and shipping

2018 Ins & Outs

2018 Financial Beneficiaries:

Image: A Sankey graph showing gross income and expenses for running Raising Luminaries in 2018. The total income was $10,128 and our total expenses including taxes and half the costs of childcare so I can work is $22,390. I can’t find the written totals for categories (also they don’t really matter), but the general gist of this graph is that it costs me way more to run things than I’m getting paid to do it. This is expected, because we’re pursuing this in a spirit outside of capitalism. I do what I can and provide it, and those who can, contribute back.

Originally posted on 1/27/19 on Patreon: Where Your 2018 Contributions Went:

[Image: A Sankey graph showing gross income and expenses for running BFL. The total income was $10,128 and our total expenses including taxes and half the costs of childcare so I can work is $22,390.]

sankey chart of 2018 Raising Luminaries budget

sankey chart of 2018 Raising Luminaries contributions & expenses

 

2017 Financial Beneficiaries:

2016 Financial Beneficiaries

I originally started Raising Luminaries / Books for Littles as a side-hustle to support my ‘real’ do-goodery work as a documentary photographer. We had no supporters and all of my affiliate income for 2016 (I think it was something in the $70-80 range, I’ll look it up later) went towards paying for expenses to helping teens in foster care find families through the Somewhere Out There series and dismantling stigma against single-mother families in the Invisible Obstacles series.

Financial Beneficiaries for 2014 & 2015

2015 & 2014 I didn’t track contributions because I made $2.64 and $0, respectively.

I’ve been asked by my lovely supporters to make this mysterious button more prominent so you can join us. So here you go:

Become a Patron!

This document created on March 2, 2020 and updated Jan 2021

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