[Image: Sankey chart of my income, expenses, and contributions for 2021, 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.

We are partners, collaborating to ignite the next generation of kind and courageous leaders, so I need money for childcare, food, shelter, healthcare, web hosting, copyediting and software, so I can focus on creating the resources you need to save time, energy, stress, and still care for your family.

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:

• Number of contributing supporters and average financial contribution per supporter.
• Ratio of contributions coming in via different channels, as well as use of sliding scales
• Proportion of people who support altruistically, in exchange for locked content, and folks who consume without reciprocating.
• Ability to financially support my children for food, shelter, healthcare, and education costs.

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 2023:

• Annual seasonal collective registration fees (Summer Accelerator & Winter Incubator)
• Monthly Luminary Braintrust membership dues
• Ko-fi donations
• Substack contributors
• Patreon support
• Occasional paypal & venmo contributors (@Raising-Luminaries)
• Illuminati consults, workshops & webinars.
• Amazon affiliate links (this is an affiliate link!)
• Bookshop.org affliate links (affiliate link)
• Nathan S. Ray, my partner, has covered our  childcare and living expenses while we make this sustainable.

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.

Income & Expenses by Year:

• 2022
• 2021
• 2020
• 2019
• 2018
• 2017
• 2016
• 2015 & 2014

2022 Ins & Outs

2022 Financial Beneficiaries (folks I sent money to)

With a few regular donations each month, I usually wait until December to try to calculate a sliding scale of my net (after-cost) income (10% if I made an average of 1k/month, 11% if I made over 2k, and so on).

However, my partner lost his job in October with zero notice and remained unemployed through the end of the year. With me bringing in less than 10k for 2023, we couldn’t cover our usual year-end contributions and I had to cancel my monthly contributions. We’re still recovering from the financial hit.

Despite this, I ended up donating $1354 (4.6%) of my gross pre-tax income, which turned out to be over 16% of my actual take-home income.

Here’s who we donated to in 2023. Most of these beneficiaries were chosen by the Little Earthquakes in keeping with our child-led Family Action Toolkits:

• Greater Boston Food Bank
• Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project
• Rosie’s Place: A local women’s shelter
• Muslim Justice League
• Resistbot
• Honor the earth
• Abortion Within Reach
• National Bail Out
• Save the children
• International Rescue Committee
• No Kids In Prison
• Abortion Doula Training
• Donors Choose
• Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center
  
• Revolutionary Humans
• Our local library
• Local school PTO for multicultural education & teacher gift cards

2022 Overview

Between a family job loss, increased payment processor fees, complex service needs as we grow, and our community members having less discretionary income to give, this is our third year in a row where our incoming contributions shrank drastically.

In 2023 we’re moving away from Patreon (because of the whole pedophile thing) and switching to a membership model privately hosted on the Raising Luminaries websites. These will be more secure, we should no longer be paying high processor fees, and we’ll no longer be complicit in funding folks who exploit children for profit.

But the transition has been bumpy. When I closed the Patreon community in October and transitioned to our own hosted site, only a tiny handful of folks came over.

I would be lying if I tried to pretend working full time in exchange for 8k a year in a place where the cost of living is 122K didn’t make me question whether the stuff I create actually has any value or use.

But the messages I receive and the feedback I get is reassuring that this work DOES make a difference. And the folks who do support our work are so dedicated to giving what they can to keep it free for everybody, it’s just too late to go back now.

So through 2023, I’m trying to build some projects that I can offer behind a paywall to incentivize folks to fund the work I do for free. Our biggest bottleneck at this point is marketing and spreading the word so more folks join us, in the hopes a small fraction is willing to fund this work and keep most of it free for everybody.

At this point, too many folks who can’t afford a paywall rely on the resources here. So I’ll keep experimenting and we’ll see how it goes!

2021 Ins & Outs

Anyway here is who I managed to give too much money to:

2021 Financial Beneficiaries (folks I sent money to)

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 12.69% of my post-tax patreon income, which turned out to be over 155% of my net take-home salary overall. (Fuck. Keeping track of my expenses is hard.)

• ACLU
• Bellamy Shoffner: Anti-racism education for children & emergency run fund
• Black Girl In Maine: Anti-racism education for white people
• Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center & the Pao Arts Center: Supporting both AAPI & new Asian immigrants with resources (like kids clothes for wealth insecure families, language support & help finding employment) and cultural activities for AAPI kids on a sliding scale.
• Cradles to Crayons: Providing essentials like diapers and hygiene products to wealth insecure families.
• Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund via Keep Growing Detroit
• Disability Visibility Project Via Alice Wong on Patreon: Advocacy for disability rights & representation
• Ekal Vidyalaya (India covid response)
• Families Belong Together (Immigrant rights)
• Families for Justice as Healing “led by incarcerated women, formerly incarcerated women, and women with incarcerated loved ones. Our mission is to end the incarceration of women and girls. “
• Greater Boston Food Bank
• Green Newton – Covid memorial tree plantings
• Indigenous Peoples Day Newton (see the IPD / abolishing Columbus day toolkit)
• Lydia X. Z. Brown
• Muslim Justice League
• My Reflection Matters – homeschooling resource for BIPOC families
• National Bail Out
• Newton Neighbors Helping Neighbors: Local mutual aid group organized & run by WOC
  
• Ramp Your Voice!: Disability rights for Black women
• Rosie’s Place
• TGI Justice Project: Led by trans, gender-variant & intersex people inside and outside prisons working toward prison abolition to dismantle punitive justice.
• Violence In Boston (the name is unclear – they’re against it)
• Wôpanaâk Language Reclamation Project
• Personal aid for a local housekeeper: In solidarity with the Essential Workers Bill of Rights, we paid a local mother from Guatemala who supports her family by cleaning houses until she was able to get vaccinated and work safely again.
• Compensating for what we consume: Tip jars for organizations and programmers who experiment and rely on interdependence & anti-capitalism
  • Newton Free Library where we get 99.9% of the books we screen, test, and analyze for your edification
  • Resistbot: Make referencing legislation & contacting my reps an easy part of my morning routine
  • Add-on tips for Go Fund Me & Actblue so recipients don’t have to pay for processing fees.
  • Our local NPR station (WBUR), after vetting all the local ones available to us, this seems to be the only one not fueled on clickbait and generating outrage.

2021 Income

Affiliate links

I no longer use Amazon affiliate links unless a book is not available on Bookshop affiliate links, and am slowly going through our archives to replace old Amazon links with Bookshop ones. In keeping, with that, I’m losing out on all the patio furniture and diapers folks purchased after clicking through my links. This was expected.

Patreon contributions

Patreon support has dropped significantly since the presidential election. Sure – some of the folks who only came out of the woodwork during 45’s administration have decided to go back to brunch and ski trips now that 45 is out of office and families Covid is over for non-disabled folks. Mostly I think people are losing their income due to covid and climate disasters, and families are stretched thin. I have to assume some folks are just aging out of our resources at this point, with some families sending kids off to high school and college.

Also roughly 37% of our supporters haven’t updated their expired credit card information, so that’s just life I guess.

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.

2021 Expenses

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

This year I got more honest about the actual costs to  me and my family about how much it costs for me to provide this work (I dedicated over 11% of our home to my work space, and need to pay for things like a PO box and to protect us from threats to post my address online, legal stuff for folks trying to co-opt the RL name to boost their SEO for scams, and to counter bullshit DMCA takedown threats (seriously, National Center for Youth Issues tried to pull this shit multiple times ’cause they got butthurt about a negative review.) Also childcare is so fucking expensive in Boston that we just now paid off the cost to send the kids to preschool. My youngest is 7!!!!

‘Marketing’ is book plates for our Little Free Library where I give away the free books I get from LFBC and publishers. I put 25% down on business class to figure out how to make running RL sustainable, and we hired a sitter to take the kids out three times a week for a few hours during the summer because I was seriously about to lose my shit if I didn’t get a few hours of silence to work.

2021 Financial Year in Review

I want to be like ‘no one died or anything so I can’t complain, but this was a really shitty year financially and I need a break or some grocery money please.‘ Except folks did indeed die. With the loss of my Amazon income, It was a shitty financial year. There’s still no affordable childcare for disabled families, we’re never donating enough. On the positive side, if we look at this as a science experiment, our failures teach us a lot and make the whole movement stronger.

Onward to 2022 where we take another stab at figuring out how to run this sustainably in an economy reliant on mega-corporations while trying not to support the mega corporations. There’s even a children’s book about that.

What we do gain is information for anyone striving to dismantle the wealth gap  – while living within a society designed to devalue and disempower folks who want to show up and lift each other up.

With the standard-operating procedure of power corrupting (and opposition using the distraction of infighting and accusations of embezzlement to derail our movements) keeping our financials transparent is an act of preventative justice, accountability, and community care. Tracking all this takes a lot of work on top of doing the work itself. Take what I learn, tweak it, and survive.  So long as we can stay transparent and accountable, I think we can keep going.

Also though – send me some money if you learned anything. These kids go through pants like tissue paper.

Donate or shop using an affiliate link via Patreon | Paypal | Venmo | Ko-fi | Buy a t-shirt | Buy a book | Buy toothpaste | Subscribe to Little Feminist Book Club

>2020 Ins & Outs

sankey chart of 2020 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.

• ACLU
• Autism Women’s Network
• Black Futures Lab
• 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 (transparency disclosure for nepotism: this is my step-sister.) Midway through she re-focused her work on ‘Fast Times at DnD high’
• Campaign Zero
• Chelsea Collaborative
• Creative Action Institute (transparency disclosure: Louisa, the director of Programs & Partnerships is my friend. She’s so great!)
• Crip Camp Emergency Fund
• 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.
• Elizabeth Warren Campaign
• FANG Community Bail Fund
• Families Belong Together (Immigrant rights)
• Flippable
• Greater Boston Food Bank
• Graeme Seabrook
• Green Light Project
• Hollaback
• Immigrant Families Together
• Incite!
• International Indigenous Youth Council
• International Rescue Committee
• Jessica Kellgren-Fozard
• Juxtaposition Arts, in coordination with our #FamilySummer4BlackLives campaign, spearheaded by Wee The People this summer, in coordination with our Ending Police Brutality Toolkit
• Karam Foundation
• Keep the Mendez family together, supporting a local father targeted by ICE
• Liberated Capital: A Decolonizing Wealth Fund
• Liberation Library:
• Lydia X. Z. Brown
• Massachusetts Homeless Coalition
• Matthew Rushin
• Migizi
• Movimiento Cosecha
• Muslim Justice League
• National Bailout: Free Black Mamas
• Native American Civil Rights Fund
• Navajo Water Project
• Newton Food Pantry
• Newton Free Library
• NSW Rural Fire Service (supporting the kids’ class fundraiser for Australian wildfire relief)
• Outright Youth Catawba Valley
• People’s Kitchen Collective & our local community farm
• Place Inside of Me Fundraiser, in coordination with our #FamilySummer4BlackLives campaign
• Planned Parenthood
• Project Bread
• Ramp Your Voice!: Disability rights for Black women
• Refugee Strong
• Rosie’s Place
• Samatha Irby
• Seeding Sovereignty
• Seeding Sovereignty
• Southside Harm Reduction Services
• TC KIDS Mental Health
• TGI Justice Project
• Trans women of color collective
• Unite To Light
• Violence In Boston (the name is unclear – they’re against it)
• Wôpanaâk Language Reclamation Project
• A white lady who asked me for money for her town election in that aggressive white lady way that I’m not equipped to handle, and it just seemed easier to give her $5 than deal with the drama, sorry.
• Personal aid for a local housekeeper: In solidarity with the Essential Workers Bill of Rights, we’ve been paying a local mother from Guatemala who supports her family by cleaning houses so she can stay home and support a family member with pre-existing conditions.
• Personal aid for a family friend waiting on unemployment checks backed up due to Covid, to help pay rent.
• Refunds for former patreon supporters financially impacted by Covid
• Compensating for what we consume: Tip jars for organizations and programmers who experiment and rely on interdependence & anti-capitalism
  • 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 & Actblue so recipients don’t have to pay for processing fees.
  • TKSST.COM: Was hoping I could use this for our lessons and wanted to contribute to another parent of color who seems to do what I do, but with videos. It turned out to be unusable for our needs.
  • Our local NPR station (WBUR), after vetting all the local ones available to us, this seems to be the only one not fueled on clickbait and generating outrage.

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.

Former contributors & income streams:

(2019 and previous)

• Solidarity Machine: T-shirt shop run by the lovely David Beasley. It’s currently closed because they’re 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.

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:

[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:

• ACLU (civil rights)
• Planned Parenthood (healthcare)
• The Brady Center  (Gun control)
• National ADAPT (Disability rights)
• Together Rising via The Compassion Collective (International/Refugee relief)
• Massachusetts Homeless Coalition (Shelters)
• The Child Foundation (International disaster relief)
• National Bail Out/ Philadelphia Community Bail Fund (Ending cash bail/systemic poverty)
• Karam Foundation (Syrian relief)
• Families Belong Together (Immigrant rights)
• Native American Rights Fund (Indigenous rights)
• RAICES (legal assistance for minor immigrants)
• Hold The Line Magazine (Black-owned, woman-owned organization promoting social justice education for families. Disclosure: HTL is featuring me/BFL in an upcoming issue.)
• Immigrant Families Together (Reuniting families violently separated at the border)
• Water for Families in Flint (personal paypal donation organized by Creighton Leigh)
• Ed Wiley Autism Acceptance Library (we contributed to the crowdfunding for an upcoming Neurodivergent Narwhals book).
• Oh Joy Sex Toy (Erika Moen) for sex education (on patreon)
• Autistic Hoya (Lydia X. Z. Brown) for trans-racial adoption, disability, and gender education. (on patreon)
• Ramp Your Voice! on Patreon (advocates for Black disabled women.)
• 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.)
• Didi Delgado
• Seeding Sovereignty: Indigenous Advocacy
• Our local elementary school to cover supplies – our school system doesn’t cover stuff like computers or basketballs, so we cover our family plus a little extra for families who can’t cover their fees.
• Our family’s Amazon smile beneficiary is set to Charity Water

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 contributions & expenses

2017 Financial Beneficiaries:

• Outright Youth of Carawba Valley (support for LGBTQ+ youth)
• The Tigerlily Foundation (breast cancer diagnostics & support run by and for women of color)
• Brooklyn Community Bail Fund (dismantling wealth inequality)
• Flippable (anti-gerrymandering)
• Massachusetts Homeless Coalition (Shelters)
• Carmelo Anthony Foundation (Puerto Rico hurricane relief)
• PAIR project (legal assistance for asylum seekers)
• ACLU
• Planned Parenthood
• Together Rising via The Compassion Collective (International/Refugee relief)
• Oh Joy Sex Toy (Erika Moen) (body acceptance, sexual health education)
• Autistic Hoya (Lydia X. Z. Brown) (civil rights)
• Ijeoma Oluo
• Didi Delgado
• The Newton Free Library, without which, BFL would be impossible because this is where all the books I write about come from!
• Our family’s Amazon smile beneficiary is set to Charity Water
• The Somewhere Out There project
• The Invisible Obstacles project

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.