Caty Simon

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

As usual, your funds allow us a little wiggle room to follow priorities besides those of our funders---to do what grant makers don't care about that much, but our members DO. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Thank you so fucking much for your donations while we took a fundraising hiatus, and for your using the monthly feature which you've been asking us about for literal years, which Gofundme has finally blessed us with! www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

No, it acknowledges the suffering while suggesting there's hope within it yet--just as the writing project on medical trauma I wrote about above does. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn... ...or that leaves it all down to the "resilience" of marginalized and oppressed communities...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

...b) nurturing that vein of hope and autonomy--and not in the some shallow bullshit sense of positivity that ignores the extreme suffering members face... www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

This programming accomplishes two purposes--a) equalizing decision making in a group that's by us and for us and... www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

One piece of capacity development we're really looking forward to is learning how to code these governance writing workshops by theme, so we get a sharper perspective on them. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We're trying to ensure that we have a vein of positivity in all our projects, including writing--trying to fit conversation about fashion + hobbies etc. into grant deliverables. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

People get truly excited about it. It is positive and hopeful, in stark contrast to conversations we always have about topics like overdose and stigma. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Then we ask each other to prioritize our ideas from 1 to 5. This is a great dialogue because unlike so many of the conversations we're forced to have about structural damage, it's about pleasure, imagination, and solutions. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We ask each other questions like: “What do you like about what we’re already doing? What would you like us to do differently? What would you like to see more of?” www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We're trialing doing a governance version of these workshops 1-2 X a year if not more often-formalizing what we've already done, having these help plan grant application programming. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Right now, during our open hours, we have a series of four discussion and writing groups. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We've replaced these with a lot of different variants of horizontal decision making over the years. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Those huge meetings worked well then, but we grew, and COVID happened, and we couldn't all be in the space at once. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We'd have a structured decision making time in those huge meetings in which all members could vote on internal decisions. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Our horizontal decision making has looked a lot of different ways. In our first years pre-COVID, from 2017-2020, we had huge all-base-membership meetings weekly. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

(Often, when you've been walking around houseless for days and are exhausted just trying to survive, you don't have much interest in planning organizationally in 6 month increments!) www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We're always thinking of ways to balance horizontal decision making processes with member capacity and interest in that. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

2)We're also using these discussion and writing groups as part of our governance process. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

After we finish the medical trauma process + refine stories to a final product with the authors, we have so much material we've accumulated from other writing projects and our own writing workshops to refine from there. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Doing this on pen and paper is a much more labor heavy process, involving rounds and rounds of scanning + in-person editing, but it's also deeply rewarding. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

It also helps us go over good examples of medical treatment and pick out details of what went right. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

In our medical trauma drafts, just going over stories together pushes through the amnesia of trauma + lets people remember crucial details of abuse + mistreatment + how they impacted them. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We've learned once again that meaning making comes as much out of editing as out of drafting, and that it's deeply collaborative for us. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

This process, like so many I've been a part of, has been organic and iterative. It's been created in collaboration with some of our most brilliant authors. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

How do you peer edit when most are housing insecure + get our phones lost/stolen all the time? We don't have time to download Google Docs, let alone learn how to use it. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Turns out, though I (Caty), have peer edited for so many projects for directly impacted people, from Tits and Sass to Narcofeminism Storyshare, those were digital first processes, and our group is a digital last group. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

We’ve been giving ourselves low-threshold employment opportunities to write for years now, but haven’t had a process to refine those drafts. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...

Donate to Whose Corner Is It Anyway, organized by Caty Simon Whose Corner Is It Anyway is a Western MA mutual aid, harm reduction, political education, and o… Caty Simon needs your support for Whose Corner Is It Anyway

Some of what we've been doing: 1) For our medical trauma project w/Baystate ED, and for our other writing workshop projects, we've been reinventing the process of peer editing. www.gofundme.com/f/whose-corn...