it's cool and good actually, and in no way makes me feel even more exhausted and ready to throw in the fucking towel, that people are believing right-wing grifters about bond funds "not helping" because they want to keep the money instead of because they're like 10 volunteers

i'm genuinely boggling that, for all the people screaming about MFF's attempt to ramp up after the huge donation spike they received, seemingly no one thus far has... asked how they can help?

it's just this immediate "THEY'RE GRIFTERS THEY'RE GRIFTERS WHERE'D THE MONEY GO"

so now i get to live in fear of our group ever "hitting the big time" and having more donations than we can handle with no paid staff, because everyone's shown they're more willing to listen to innuendo spouted by neonazis than the words of people doing the fucking work

everyone is new to this area where tons of people and community orgs have been quietly working and if they expect focus-tested "We see you, we hear you" PR-worded statements, sorry, buckos

we're all doing this in our free time

we're here, we're exhausted, we're trying our best

anyway i guess my point is, there's entire fucking conferences about how to scale up your tech company when it suddenly explodes in popularity, but everyone in the community org space is just... trying our best with what we have, and that doesn't lend itself to scaling up well.

I'm intentionally using 'community org' in contrast to the 'NFP-industrial complex': bootstrapped, small orgs staffed by volunteers taking care of local needs, not people getting six-figure salaries made of donations.

You can even check their 2018 990: https://apps.irs.gov/pub/epostcard/cor/821214607_201812_990EZ_2019111516853303.pdf

If you do you'll see the exact kind of things that i'd expect: a big ol list of volunteers, very little in the way of assets outside of the revolving fund that accounts for the 100k they had.

anyway, if you're going to engage with this movement, you're going to need to understand that not everyone is out to fuck you out of money, and be willing to extend some grace to the people who are suddenly in the spotlight after years of quietly doing the work.

On further thinking, the first tweet in this thread is wrong. It doesn't make me feel like throwing in the towel. But it makes it very clear that the feeling I've had for the past three weeks, of the cavalry finally showing up, is conditional.