This spring, we’re looking for volunteers to help raise money for Queers for Economic Justice. This is an urgent request and we need YOU to help volunteer!

What?: We’re holding a fundraising phone-banking event in April and May to benefit QEJ. We’ll be calling supporters and friends to ask them to support QEJ’s amazing work and make sure it continues this year!

Why Now?: QEJ is one of the ONLY grassroots organizations that challenges the systems that create poverty and economic injustice within queer communities. From the Shelter Project to QEJ’s critical analysis – our movement needs more organizations like QEJ! We’re calling on you to help support an organization that is a life-line for our community!

When are we doing this?: There are two dates you can help us call folks – Monday, April 22nd from 6 – 10pm AND Monday, May 20th from 6:30 – 9:30pm. First time fundraising or making calls? NO worries! We’ll go through an expert training led by fundraising wiz Bex Ahuja — trust us, many of us were nervous about fundraising over the phone until we went through Bex’s fabulous and comprehensive training

How can you get involved?: Volunteer to phone bank with all of us amazing current and former QEJ interns, staff, board members and supporters! Bring your cellphone and your enthusiasm. Recruit your friends to help call people too – the more the merrier. You can also bring some food to share.

Even MORE reasons to love QEJ: Queers for Economic Justice is a progressive non-profit organization committed to promoting economic justice in a context of sexual and gender liberation. Our goal is to challenge and change the systems that create poverty and economic injustice in our communities, and to promote an economic system that embraces sexual and gender diversity. We are committed to the principle that access to social and economic resources is a fundamental right, and we work to create social and economic equity through grassroots organizing, public education, advocacy and research. We do this work because although poor queers have always been a part of both the gay rights and economic justice movements, they have been, and continue to be, largely invisible in both movements. This work will always be informed by the lived experiences and expressed needs of queer people in poverty.

jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.” He went on to add that taxpayers “just cannot go subsidize everybody’s rent,” and called on taxpayers to call their representatives and voice their disapproval of the city’s long-time policy that guarantees shelter will be provided to anyone in need.

At Queers for Economic Justice, we are shocked and appalled by the Mayor’s remarks. Jay Toole, a QEJ board member who was homeless for 25 years before co-founding QEJ, responded, “I have never known anyone who entered the shelter system by limo, jet, car service, jet skis, yacht, or any mode other than foot, ambulance, or police car.” Jay added, “I may not be here with you if this decree was not signed years ago; I probably would have died on the streets. To deny someone their right to shelter is to deny them their dignity and their basic human rights. So, I am calling my representative to say, ‘Keep the right to shelter in place,’ and I am calling on my community to do the same.”

Any one of us has the potential to become homeless at any moment, due to fire, flood, domestic violence or one of many other factors that suddenly leave people without a place to stay. ”As we know from our work in the shelters,” noted Amber Hollibaugh, Executive Director of QEJ, “no one enters the shelter system because it’s a good place to live; people enter shelters because they are in trouble and because they need help.” TheNew York Cityshelter system leaves much to be desired, but it is the only safety net we have to ensure that someone in crisis can get a roof over their head, and we need to keep it in place.

If you are interested in getting involved in our organizing and support work with LGBTQ folks living in the shelter system,  we will be holding an information session this Wednesday at 7 p.m. We’ll be meeting in our office to go over what our work in the shelter system entails, and what it means to get involved. We hope to see you there!

If you have questions about volunteering, please email volunteer@q4ej.org.

Queers for Economic Justice presents:

Queer Gen(d)erations: Leaving/Establishing a Progressive Queer Legacy

Cecilia Genitili (trans activist & educator), J. Jack Halberstam (professor & author), Denise Infinity (House Of Infinity), Tanya Saunders (professor & author) and Imani Uzuri (singer, song writer, composer, artist) talk about what it means to leave a progressive queer legacy in the time of a broke-ass economy. Reflecting on queer legacies in art, activism and academia, we will engage in a discussion about how queers create community, engage in alternative economies, and pass on strategies of survival. We will focus in particular on the ball scene and how it offers alternative notions of family, kinship, legacy, and inheritance that are not beholden to a market economy.

New York 11/28/2012 by Andrea Sears (WBAI)

On Tuesday photographer and photo journalist Syd London visited the Rockaways with a doctor and a fourth year medical student from Mount Sinai Hospital to see first-hand what the medical needs of storm victims in that part of the city are, if those needs are being met, and to compare what the city is reporting to what is actually happening on the ground.  WBAI’s Andrea Sears spoke withLondonabout what she saw.

Location: Community Action Center based in a NYCHA building at B. 68th St & Rockaway Beach Blvd, The Rockaways, NY.

Click the link the WBAI site to listen to audio of the interview:

http://www.wbai.org/articles.php?headline=Photojournalist%20Documents%20Medical%20Needs%20Of%20Hurricane%20Sandy%20Survivors

I’m sorry to be so out of touch with QEJ friends and supporters after Hurricane Sandy. We are all okay here and thank all of you for your messages of concern and your offers of help. It means a lot to us. You can see the picture above of QEJ working in Coney Island with a crew of QEJ stakeholders, pitching in to do work in the midst of the devastation. Let me fill you in about what’s been happening here since Hurricane Sandy and tell you a little about how QEJ is working to support queer folks as they struggle to manage the impact of this storm on our beloved city. If you want to support QEJ’s work, please donate.

“It was crowded and we were isolated. There were twice as many people there at mealtime, and I was worried we’d run out of food. They cleared out the floor with the television to move in people who needed shelter as a result of the storm, so none of us already living there could watch the news. I mean, we had no idea what was going on and no way to find out. We were all scared” said J, a queer shelter resident.

In a terrible three day period, Hurricane Sandy doubled the homeless population of New York, adding another 40,000 to 50,000 people to the 47,000 folks already homeless in NYC. The queer part of those numbers translates to 4,000 to 5,000 folks who are currently homeless or in shelters. So if the number of the homeless has now doubled, it’s likely the number of queer folks made newly homeless has also doubled. On October 29^th, when Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast we learned the human price of what a superstorm rips apart. Parks and schools and roads and hospitals and endless other kinds of critical structures, yes. But most of all, it devastates the places people call home.

The folks who QEJ works with in the shelters were immediately impacted. Though I’ve seen no reports in the media, the city had no emergency plan for a storm of this size and devastation. That means there were no additional housing options for these newly homeless people, including that newly exploded number of LGBTQ Hurricane Sandy survivors. So the city is now jamming many of these hurricane evacuees into the existing city shelters that sustained no damage.

QEJ continued to run our shelter support groups during the week of the storm and we haven’t stopped. But we now have a lot of new members. These new LGBTQ folks are asking us to help them find the safe places when they try to access hurricane relief. – What FEMA offices are safe for Hurricane Sandy transgender and gender non-conforming evacuees when trying to get the benefits they desperately need? What can we do for the stone butch and her femme girlfriend and their three kids who called us because they have been put in separate shelters, and told that it’s temporary? And everybody we work with is worried about the overcrowding they are living in, about ongoing food supplies being enough to go around, about there being enough of what is often never enough for folks who are evacuees and for permanent shelter residents alike. And LGBTQ evacuees continue to ask for QEJ’s help to obtain basic necessities these LGBTQ folks could not grab as they fled.

New York has always been a hard place to be poor, and QEJ’s shelter and homeless work is a reflection of that reality. At QEJ we do that work with homeless and poor folks who are queer, because so often we are invisible, even when we are even more impacted and vulnerable. And that now includes queer folks affected by this storm. QEJ works every day with queer folks whose stories of poverty, targeting, racism and homelessness are brutal and never ending. Hurricane Sandy is no exception. It is why QEJ does what we do, running queer support groups in NYC shelters and doing outreach to help and support LGBTQ folks who are poor, who live in shelters or are who are homeless.

If you can help us do this new work, as we continue our regular activism, that would be incredible — Click here to donate now! QEJ does work that no one else does and that work has exploded because of the storm. We need to do clothing drives and additional LGBTQ support groups. And we need to dolong term work to have queer voices as leadership in the fight that is about to take place for safe housing and regrowth for all people who are homeless, whether through damaging storms or the equally vicious impact of poverty and economic injustice.

Because after such a storm, we do this work at QEJ to say explicitly that the lifesaving quality of being a part of a valued community doesn’t stop when you’re too broke to have a bed or aren’t counted as a vital part of the LGBTQ community because you are homeless. That includes the thousands of LGBTQ folks already in the shelter system and the thousands of queer folks made homeless by Hurricane Sandy.

On behalf of our members, our constituents, our staff and board, we want to thank you for your ongoing and generous support. When you give to QEJ, you are making a commitment to justice for all queers, despite their income, race, ability, legal status, or gender identity. Through that commitment, you are helping all people struggling in these hard times to survive.

Be well.

Amber Hollibaugh
Executive Director, QEJ

You can make your donation to QEJ here: http://q4ej.org/donate

Queers for Economic Justice is writing this message in sorrow to tell our friends and supporters that on Friday, November 9^th, 2012, William Brandon Lacy Campos, QEJ’s former Co-Executive Director, died unexpectedly. He was only 35. There are few other details available at this moment. We are sending our love and condolences to his family, his partner Nico, to David and Mimzy, and to his friends and closest comrades-in-arms.

All of us at QEJ are shocked and grief-stricken at his passing. Brandon was a luminous but wounded gift to our community. His death is a tragic and a terrible thing. We know that we have lost another person we could not afford to lose. And as a part of a great family of fighters, QEJ can see that there is a terrible crisis occurring in our community, one which causes us to suffer the deaths of so many precious people who could not survive the terrible price of oppression and the overwhelming toll it exacts. It is deeply evident in Brandon’s unexpected death, reminding us of the scars and vulnerabilities of so many whom we love.

We do not yet understand how to save these complicated lives. QEJ believes that we must start to have a different conversation, not with rhetoric or in blame, but because we are each other’s best hope for survival. We are heartbroken at saying farewell to you, Brandon: Sweet friend, brave fighter, beautiful queer spirit, QEJ family. You will not be forgotten.

Last week, Queers for Economic Justice returned from the International AIDS Conference to New York City, where a debate over whether employers should be required to give their workers paid sick days has become a leading issue in City Hall and in the media. Lack of paid sick days is a significant problem for New Yorkers living and working with HIV/AIDS, who don’t have the privilege of taking sickness lightly, and must prioritize their health above all else when sick.  This could mean staying home in bed to get needed rest or scheduling an emergency visit to the doctor’s office. Without the ability to take paid sick time, the health and economic security of people living with HIV/AIDS are jeopardized.

There is legislation pending in the NYC Council that would alleviate this problem by requiring most businesses to give a modest number of paid sick days to their workers to use for themselves or to care for a sick family member.

The legislation enjoys broad public support as well as a veto-proof majority of support in the City Council.  If passed, the legislation would lift a serious burden off the nearly 1.5 million workers in NYC who currently don’t get a single paid sick day.  This is especially true for immigrant workers, people of color, and people with low-wage jobs, who are among the least likely to get paid sick days.

Paid sick days also play an important public health role.  When sick workers go to work, they increase the spread of illness.  Nobody wants to be served by a sick waiter at a restaurant.  For people living with HIV/AIDS, the risk of complications from influenza and other communicable illnesses make the public health importance of paid sick days particularly vital.

Considering how important this issue is to LGBTQ workers and our brothers and sisters living with HIV/AIDS, it’s disturbing that some of the most prominent and powerful opponents of the legislation come from within the LGBTQ community.
The openly gay Speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, is the single person standing in the way of the legislation’s passage.  If she allowed the bill to the floor for a vote, it would fly through the City Council.

Backing Speaker Quinn is Tony Juliano, the general manager of the gay bar XES Lounge in Chelsea, who recently claimed that despite considering his workers to be family, he opposes giving them five paid sick days per year.  Almost ninety percent of restaurant and bar workers don’t get paid sick days – most go to work sick for fear of losing their jobs, and many actually do lose their jobs when they call in sick.

At Queers for Economic Justice, we have an initiative called Poverty and HIV/AIDS Stop Together. Through this project, we are highlighting how issues like paid sick days connect anti-poverty work and HIV/AIDS Activism. We are also launching a Queer Survival Economics initiative, which seeks to make visible the impact of the recession on LGBTQ communities. In today’s economy, workers are struggling to stay employed and provide for those closest to them, and they need paid sick days more than ever.

It’s time for the LGBTQ community to come together to support this safe, sane, and sensible policy.

Amber Hollibaugh and Brandon Lacy Campos, Co-Directors of Queers for Economic Justice.

WHERE: Ginger’s Bar 363 5th Ave (between 5th and 6th Sts.)

WHEN: Sunday, July 29th, 2012 (12:00pm until 5:00pm) ]]> http://q4ej.org/qej-fundraising-extravaganza/feed 0 http://q4ej.org/qej-fundraising-extravaganza http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/QueersForEconomicJustice/~3/4PUbTkt0aHw/july-28th-qejs-annual-barbecue http://q4ej.org/july-28th-qejs-annual-barbecue#comments Mon, 09 Jul 2012 18:04:16 +0000 Q4EJ http://q4ej.org/?p=1415 QEJ’s 4th annual summer barbecue is coming up Saturday August 4th! Check out the Facebook event for more information.