One of the ways we live out our values of justice, equity, and liberation is through redistributing 5% of our revenue toward creating permanent affordable housing in our home city of DC through a contribution to the Douglass Community Land Trust.
Redistribution acknowledges the historic and current injustice of resource allocation in our society that stems from slavery, colonization, and genocide. It aims to counter our political and economic system of racial capitalism and ongoing policies that secure generational wealth accumulation for some while ensuring scarcity for others, such as redlining and racial housing covenants, as well as exclusion from government programs like the GI bill and federal labor protections.
As a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-class community with members of many multifaceted identities (e.g. disability, gender) that affect our access to money, we know that not everyone in our community has discretionary income and that each of us is differently positioned in relationship to structural racism, class, and privilege. At the same time, as a community, one of our collective assets is access to financial resources. Because a majority of our members and leaders are white and many in our community hold class privilege and/or have access to wealth, we know that our collective ability to raise funds is in part made possible by the unjust and racially inequitable distribution of resources in our society.