So it’s that time of year again where conspicuous consumption, The United State’s favorite pastime, goes into overdrive. Here at the CFC, we’d like to counter the external pressure to buy the latest expensive gadget that will be obsolete by the next manufactured buying push, by suggesting you gift differently. Last year, CF Crunkista got this tradition off to an excellent start and we are building on that work this year. Basically, boo capitalism but if you are going to spend, here are some awesome products, people, and projects to support this holiday season.
- Products
- The soon to be released, The Summer We Got Free by Black Girl Dangerous Mia Mckenzie is some of the best fiction out there. If you are able to read this book, you should and so should everyone you know! The kind of seeds this will plant in minds will be the most delicious of strange fruit!
- Danielle Henderson turned her Feminist Ryan Gosling tumblr into a book! Buy it from the feminist bookstore Charis and you are doing two great things at once!
- A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara and What Makes A Baby by Cory Silverberg are great children’s book for any little ones in your life.
- If you just have to have an e-reader, get a Kobo and support independent bookstores in the process. They’re the only e-reader that promises not to share your secret copy of 50 Shades of Grey with the Feds.
- A toy that encourages little girls to be engineers. :o) Goldieblocks…yes, I know “goldie” but its an awesome idea. For a less whitewashed toy try Roominate, created by three women (1.5 of color) engineers designed to help spark girls’ interests in STEM.
- For beautiful, hand-made art, Chicana feminist scholar and folk artist: http://www.etsy.com/shop/calaverasYcorazones
- For the Queer satorialist on your list, try Malakni, Marimacho, The Andy Moon Collection, and Distinguished Cravat. For fat fashionistas, support Fat Fancy Fashions.
- Your favorite childhood book– the actual print version from your childhood that you find at a used bookstore or online.
- A nineties-celebrity-turned-ordinary-citizen autograph. Last I heard, Devoe was selling real estate in Atlanta. Surely he would sign a shirt for Moya for $20 (please!!!). Also, I know some people who know some people who know the members of The Boys (Dial my Heart). And if you want to get CF Crunkonia a gift, please track down at least one of the girls from Visions (Ooh La La) and get them to sign something.
- More Music ideas – For music to gift, buy music from some great indie (self-distributed artists):
- People
- Support the people of Palestine! Buy some good Palestinian olive oil, donate money to important Pro-Palestinian organizations and efforts.
- Support a local person who knows how to do something. Even if this person isn’t marketing their services, pay them to give you and your friends a workshop. For instance, get one of your best dancer friends to teach a session on twerkin. Do you have a spoken word artist in your kinship circle? Get them to teach the tools of spoken word that may just help you in your daily tasks. Do your own Shawty Got Skillz Share or invite the shawties to teach you something!
- Are you trying to understand your life and the reason you keep encountering different versions of the same person over and over again? Raising a little one and want to adapt your parenting to fit their emotional needs? Give the gift of an astrological reading by the one and only Yolo Akili.
- Do you know a desperate graduate student or organization that needs some editing post haste? Buy them some editing hours from Summer McDonald.
- Projects
- set up a debt strike cooperative with friends and family- We were geeked when we heard about the strike debt campaign and we still are excited about it’s potential though a bit more curious about all its various implications. Think about starting a debt coop or innovative money collaborative with friends and family!
- A role playing session in which you play the role of a person your friend needs to ask for forgiveness and or make amends with. You can help your friend talk through the language of apology.
- A self made coupon book with coupons like:
- 2 Regular Helping Hands Sessions and 1 Pre- or- post gathering Helping Hands Session. A helping hands session is when one of your friends comes over to do what you would pay someone to do if you could, only they don’t judge you under their breath. Helping hands sessions are best when there is more than one friend coming over.
- 2 Two Strand Twist Sets. Two strand twists: anyone can do them, but few people want to do it for free because face it, heads are big.
- Closet Clean Out Day and/ or Clothes Swap. Watch an episode of Clean Sweep (the TLC show that predated Clean House) on youtube and apply the rules to your friend’s messiest closet.
- Babysitting, babysitting, babysitting…
- Day’o’movies… And not just on the weekend. Choose a day that you will both (or all) deliberately take off of work and watch movies all day. You don’t even have to shower.
- V(Ex) Day- On one of the Hallmark Holidays that shall go unmentioned, have a day of heart cleansing for your friends who still pine over exes. Create a ceremony in which you release the memories to the past and embrace the people you are in the present. Ask forgiveness. Grant forgiveness. Catalog, throw away and digitize old couples pictures. Put in the universe what you’d like in partners, lovers or friends in the future. Figure out what it is that your friends want from romantic partners that you can do (someone to talk to on the regular, someone who takes out the trash, someone to help with the kids, someone to help with household chores, etc.)
- Donations
- Give a VOTE to “BLACK GIRLS CODE” by December 20 & help this project win $100,000 http://vimeo.com/focusforwardfilms/semifinalists/51886136
- Help FUND The Black Girl Project They had an unsuccessful funding cycle on Kickstarter. We can still help this organization. If you work with women and girls, teach on these subjects, or know someone who does, you might want to gift them: – a DVD from the Black Girl Project: http://blackgirlproject.org/film/ – a shirt from their merch store: http://skreened.com/thebgp
- Help FUND Intermedia Arts youth programming in Minneapolis Here are their programs: http://www.intermediaarts.org/programs.php Here is a fun video created by youth about all the programs that they are involved in at Intermedia: http://vimeo.com/52033292 This is the organization behind Be Girl Be: A Celebration of Women in Hip Hop (http://www.intermediaarts.org/b-girl-be1) http://www.intermediaarts.org/give
- Help FUND the Tribeca Film Institute’s Youth Programs in NYC http://www.tribecafilminstitute.org/youth/ http://www.tribecafilminstitute.org/about/support/
- Help FUND Juxtaposition Arts, Northside Minneapolis View their projects: http://www.juxtaposition.org http://givemn.razoo.com/story/Juxtaposition-Arts?utm_source=Juxtaposition+arts+List&utm_campaign=2f9e190b13-JXTA_2011_V110_25_2011&utm_medium=email
- Help FUND Hope Community Center, Southside Minneapolis They do AMAZING mural, hip-hoop and youth/young adult community organizing: http://www.hope-community.org/revitalization/youth-power-project http://www.hope-community.org/donate
- Donate to the CFC!
We know you have ideas too, dear readers! What’s on your list to give and receive this year?
http://www.punjammies.com/pages/the-story-of-punjammies “PUNJAMMIES™ are created in after-care facilities for women who have been rescued, released or escaped from a life of forced prostitution. Their lives have been marked by a message – you are a commodity – to be used for others’ gain. Whether sold by her own family, trafficked from another country or driven by desperation, she was a slave to this life. Each story is as unique as each woman.”
Thanks for this. Here’s some critical thinking around punjammies as you decide whether to put them on your list or not. http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/08/20/development-initiatives-and-the-invisibility-of-power/
This is such a great list.
I want to add supporting three things.
1.) Walmart Strikers Food Fund:
https://www.wepay.com/donations/walmart-strikers-food-fund?utm_source=OccupyWallSt.org&utm_campaign=edb7a1e66d-Walmart_strikers11_14_2012&utm_medium=email
2.) Support the Ali Forney Center in NYC. It was destroyed during Hurricane Sandy, but thanks to donors will now be able to rebuild. The center provides shelter for homeless LGBTQ youth, and is named for a transwoman murdered in NYC in the late 1990s.
http://www.aliforneycenter.org
3.) Buy a friend a used copy of a favorite book from childhood. Crunkonia knows how much I loved the Baby-Sitters Club as a kid. She found a copy of an old book from the series, wrote me a sweet note inside and sent it to me. It’s one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve received in a while.
I work at at a group home for young girls with minimal and dysfunctional family support. I want to make them care packages and have them shipped to them on Christmas Eve as from Santa. I have been struggling with deciding on what to put in their packages, and you’ve given me so many fabulous ideas. They need some positive influence on their life, and I think giving them things that will impact their life is essential. This is a fantastic post, and I hope more people decide to give gifts like these. Thanks for the information and inspiration. Some young ladies’ lives may be changed as a result.
These were awesome. Thank you all for sharing. I hope to come up with a little something something of my own. Since not celebrating holidays I would like to possibly make gifts and/or volunteer.
Happy Holidays to You All!!!
Reblogged this on Run-On Sentences and commented:
CFCs is Always On to Something-Check it out!!!
Thank you so much for putting me on the list! I’m so flattered to be included in such great company! Mil gracias!
Thank you so much for the support! We’re actually 1.5 of color :). Alice is half Thai!
This response made me think of a lovely article I just read by Thea Lim on the linguistics of describing mixed race people (as halves, etc). I loved it because it vocalized some of the things I’ve thought about when deciding how to describe my mixed heritage to people, while respecting the idea that we should describe our selves as we please. Find it here: http://www.thealim.org/?p=89
How about donating money to Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project (QWOCMAP) so that another queer woman of color, gender nonconforming or transgender person of color can take a FREE filmmaking workshop. Workshops like this cost between $2,000-$5,000 and QWOCMAP, a social justice feminist, queer-led, immigrant-founded, artist-run organization offers them for FREE. It costs QWOCMAP $500 per partipant to offer the workshops. It’s a gift that keeps giving, through the transformative process of creating a film, watching a film with people that look like you, and talking about the films with your friends and family. If you can’t give $500, even $5, $10 or $25 will pay for a mess of mini-dv tapes, and that is someone’s film.
NO PRESENTS!