44% OFF on my last course ‘Abundance For Careworkers’ at the very end of this post !
I remember walking into a community meeting last winter — I can’t remember what this space was about but I do remember it the kind where we spent two hours mapping our agreements about consent, naming our access needs, and creating brave space guidelines. We talked about how to speak to each other and when, how to navigate conflict, what to do when we were triggered.
The facilitator had thought of everything—fidget toys scattered on tables, multiple ways to participate, even a separate room for anyone who needed to step away. It was beautiful, really. The kind of intentional care that made my chest expand with possibility.
But when it came time to discuss payment for the facilitator’s labor, the energy shifted. Suddenly, we were “keeping it grassroots.” Money felt too messy, too corrupt for our pure intentions. The facilitator smiled and said they were ‘happy to do it for the community,’ while something flickered behind their eyes—a familiar exhaustion I’ve seen in the mirror. Maybe it was just fawning.
We’ve become masters at building emotional safety, psychological safety, physical safety. We know how to hold space for trauma, how to navigate power dynamics, how to create containers where the most vulnerable among us can breathe. But financial safety? That’s where our radical imagination stops.
We’ll spend hours crafting community agreements but won’t discuss fair compensation. We’ll center consent in every interaction except when it comes to asking people to work for free. We’ll talk about abolishing oppressive systems while recreating the very extraction we claim to resist.
The harm isn’t just in the unpaid labor—though that’s real. It’s in the message we send: that care work isn’t valuable enough to sustain, that our revolution should somehow exist outside the material world, that the same people doing the most healing work should also bear the most financial burden.
I watch brilliant organizers burn out not from the work itself, but from trying to survive while giving everything away. I see care practitioners dilute their offerings because they’re ashamed to name their worth. I witness spaces that center justice everywhere except in their relationship to money.
What if our commitment to safety included the safety to be paid for our labor? What if financial transparency was as important as emotional transparency? What if we understood that building sustainable movements requires building sustainable livelihoods?
I want to share more about what happened when I finally stopped pretending that to not think or talk about money didn’t matter in our work, that it wasn’t harmful or recreating systems of exploitation for marginalized people—and how everything changed when I realized that avoiding money wasn’t keeping us pure; it was keeping us (specifically the poorest of us) small-er.
Until then, I’m curious: what would change in your work, your organizing, your care practice, if financial safety felt as important as every other kind of safety you create?!
Paid subscribers, I wanted to offer you my course, Abundance For Careworkers for 44% OFF. This offer expires on Dec. 4! If you are a FUNDER Member, this course, and many more, are completely free for you. Please don’t purchase it !
Access Abundance For Careworkers here.
