The last $40 goes to gas and hot dogs. We gather anyway. On the table is Grandma’s potato salad in a 1970s pyrex, potato chips, watermelon. The kids are pulling unripe tomatoes off the vine and throwing them at each other. Someone whispers Kohen Wiley’s name, careful not to be the downer at the party, careful not to say it with the panic it deserves, and opens a Heineken with their flip flop. Later, fireworks will boom through the streets making this place feel like the warzone it actually is. On the Capitol Mall they’ll read the declaration out loud: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights…” All men are created equal. The parade roars down the road. We watch from the curb and someone refills the cooler and nobody says what we all know.
We exist in two places at once. We are here laughing at a TikTok and worrying whether the potato salad has been in the sun too long. But we are also in the California City detention center, we are next to Keith Porter Jr’s daughters in their grief, we are on a flight to Spain with our trans neighbor, toward asylum, a life out of the shadows.
In 1979, we gathered too. Not on a lawn with potato salad and a cooler. In San Francisco, at The Women’s Building, with the same knowledge as we have with us today. We knew that freedom was never promised to us. It was never ours to hold. By design. We knew that power and wealth must be moved, that systems of love and justice don’t seed themselves.
This is the American project: a promise that freedom is something that belongs to us, that it was won, that it can be held. We hold these truths. We the people. And of course the people who literally owned other people wrote these words.
Writer, historian, and Women’s Foundation California board member Dr. Anna Malaika Tubbs has spent years giving us the language to see this clearly. Her clarity, it turns out, provides its own kind of freedom. American patriarchy, she says, has “purposely erased itself from the picture,” convincing us that everything happening is natural and unavoidable. This isn’t new. This isn’t a deviation. This is exactly what the founders designed.
Philanthropy was built and exists inside the same system of patriarchy. For decades, less than two cents of every philanthropic dollar reached women and girls. Twenty cents of every hundred dollars reached LGBTQ communities. This is not oversight, it’s by design. That day at The Women’s Building, we saw it clearly and didn’t wait. We pooled what we had and started redistributing resources toward women and gender-expansive people, outside of the system that was failing all of us.
We fund what America won’t. The abortion. The policy work keeping Black birthing people alive. The Indigenous land back movements, the immigrants held in courtrooms. The drag queen volunteering for story time. The street vendors. The trans organizer creating sanctuary. The sex worker in search of healthcare. The slam poet who wants to write policy. The survivors. The people the founders counted as property.
We are still in The Women’s Building. We are still on the lawn. Someone’s refilling the cooler. The tomato plant is bare. And philanthropy is still in the board room, doing the legal minimum, still asking for twelve-page applications, still running quarterly reporting cycles, still holding meetings about meetings, still governed by the same formality and patriarchy it was built inside of. The people it claims to serve are on flights to Spain and in detention centers and whispering names at backyard parties because the grief is too big to say out loud.
Move the money. Now. With the urgency we found in 2020 and lost somewhere between the strategic plan and the endowment review. Trust the people doing the work.
It’s America’s 250th birthday party and we aren’t asking to be invited. We are not asking to be included in a system that was never made for us — we are making new ones. We gather because we are the stewards of our freedom. We have the audacity to make the universe we dream.