October 29, 2025

Fall fundraiser: for hope and help

As I’m sure y’all know, ICE has been hitting Chicago and their suburbs hard. This past week, as we’ve been dreading since this all started, our PF blogger friend and teacher reported that a former student was being walked to school by their dad and ICE abducted the father. Her district serves a high Hispanic population so we knew this was coming, and that this is going to keep happening. Anticipation and expectation doesn’t make it any less painful.

This coincides with SNAP benefits running out by the end of this week, on Nov 1, with no funding in sight. As I understand it, the administration is legally required to use the contingency funds to fund SNAP and naturally they’re illegally refusing to. This extra layer of political brinkmanship is going to leave a whole lot of folks, and kids, hungry.

Here in the SF Bay area, federal agents arrived last week to harass and terrorize our friends and neighbors. Not that long ago, they were in LA in force, where we also have friends and family.

None of this is happening at any remove, it’s all personal and it’s all directly affecting our wellbeing and our communities.

Of course we have already donated to our local food banks. Of course we’ve donated to help people directly, and repeatedly. 3-4 times a year, we send Penny and her students snacks. We regularly give direct aid to folks who are barely keeping heads above water, between struggling with health problems and/or having their online businesses devastated by the current administration’s policies. I still support Lakota families. (Which reminds me that my latest box of community donations is full to the brim and needs to be shipped to the reservations.)

But it all starts to feel a bit like drops in a bucket when the need has become so great and so overwhelming. It all feels really awful right now. It’s the million big and small ways that the news and this administration and the world chips away at us, daily.

Maybe everyone is exhausted like I am.
Maybe everyone is feeling a bit deflated like I feel.
Maybe things are too hard right now. No, things are definitely too hard right now.
But if you’re stable enough, if you’re not worried about making the rent or getting food on the table, and you can, maybe y’all would also still like to help folks, like I do.

Cat Valente’s Tiny Adds Up: Unshittification and The Pawshank Redemption reminded me of a time when we could pool our resources and move the needle for people in an impactful way.

Online, our community has been uprooted and flung to the winds with the destruction of Twitter and the lack of a universal replacement. Bluesky serves my own basic social needs for now but my friends are spread across Mastodon, Instagram, Threads.

Usually I would start small and see if we could pick up momentum from there but given the state of things, I only have one simple ask: do you want to help me help folks?

If you want to donate: Venmo: @RK-Tillman
PayPal: ruthtillman@gmail.com
Cashapp: $ruthkt

If you want to share, that would be awesome ❣️

Some of the folks I’d like to help (and there are a lot more where they came from):

As always, the Lakota families. Winter is going to hit them very hard.
Jack of Oi Shiny who’s been going through it with heart failure and still trying to craft for the business.
Lily Meade, author, currently unhoused.

We can’t solve everything for everyone but if we can buy some folks a bit of breathing room to get through the winter, that would be a kindness.

Edited to add: This is an Op-Ed published at One Spirit from RF Buche, the President & CEO of GF Buche Companies, that speaks to the deep poverty of the people in South Dakota, particularly on the reservations. Buche is the only grocery store on the reservation that I’m aware of – there may be others but the coordinators have never mentioned them. They worked with One Spirit (the same organization that I do my Lakota support through) to offer residents discounts for a long time.