Accountability In Giving

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Last week I pulled a volunteer shift at The Bowery Mission, which, for those of you who do not know New York well, is a mainstay organization servicing the unhoused and hungry downtown. It is extremely easy to sign up for a shift online, the volunteer work requires no special skills, and because of COVID and the surging housing issues in our city, it is a constant need that is always understaffed.

The supervising coordinator (who works full time shifts organizing volunteer work and then eventually doing a lot of the work themself because there are so few volunteers) shared that recently their community members - referring to visitors seeking care - has tripled, and they have not been able to identify or understand the source of the surge, and are struggling to keep up with the demand for goods and services.

I signed up to work in the Clothing Room because it felt like penance for my years in fashion, and also because I put myself through college working retail and since then using my nerdy brain to organize rooms full of clothing has always brought me a weird sense of calm. I started writing this dispatch in my head during that two hour shift.

If you have followed me for a while you have certainly heard me recommend a few resources around learning about fashion overconsumption and our attitude toward apparel’s disposability. The organization The OR Foundation, based in Ghana, sheds light on the Global North’s attitude toward apparel disposal and its devastating effects on the health, infrastructure and economy of the Global South. If you haven’t already, please read about Dead White Man’s Clothes, about the secondary clothing trade at Kantamanto Market in Accra based entirely on this attitude of disposability. Aja Barber’s book, Consumed, is a freshly published look at this attitude and how the fashion industry (and all of its participants, myself included) can do better. Slow Factory runs Open Edu, where visiting guest educators often touch on the global and spectral impact of our attitude toward clothes, and their education is free and open to all.

Unfortunately, spaces like the Clothing Room at the Bowery Mission become a bit of a local petri dish for the problems covered by the resources I listed above.

What I saw when sorting and organizing deliveries fell into two categories.

1. Brands that found themselves overstocked on certain products that were either seasonal or defective, and ultimately decided to take a tax write off by donating to charity rather than attempting to recycle the products into their own supply chain, which is how I came to unpack 45 XXL sweatshirts with the printed slogan “Run Wild Young Blood 2017” that afternoon.

2. Individuals who have become accustomed to having access to resale anything even remotely of value (you can buy used candles on Poshmark these days, FYI), and so their donations to charitable organizations tend to be the dregs of their wardrobe, or what would otherwise go in the garbage were they not inclined to perform Good Deeds. This is how I came to unpack several bags women’s thong underwear with no tags.

Subsequently, the items that are truly needed, which are: sturdy boots, well-made jeans, belts and weatherproof items, are missing entirely, and instead there are racks on racks on racks of discard t shirts and decorative fashion accessories. Once or twice a week, community members are invited to the Clothing Room to pick fresh clothing, and so it is important that the room remain organized in order to maintain efficacy and safety and the dignity of anyone visiting for support.

Our collective attitude toward charity, which we have seen expressed myriad of ways especially throughout the pandemic, is summarily defined by the old phrase “Beggars can’t be choosers.” We see it when people dump pocket change or half eaten food into the collection cups of those living on the street, we see it in the way we approach monetary giving to institutions, which is often consequential rather than deliberate, and we see it in the way we expect the world to receive our cast-offs. And the general expectation is that anyone receiving charity should simply be happy to have something.

Some years ago I worked with a brand called Brother Vellies, and early in the company’s life the founder coordinated a project meant to expose the west’s attitude toward donated clothing by re-saling t-shirts found in the second hand markets of Nairobi. Like most of the other secondhand clothing markets in post-colonial developing nations, the stock is dense with promotional t shirts from conferences and events, and especially sports events. One of my favorite facts that I learned from this project and think about all the time is that before every significant sports event like a World Series or Super Bowl (I am not a sports person), winners merchandise is printed in bulk for both teams, so that whoever wins will be able to sell results-relevant merchandise immediately. Guess where the inaccurate merchandise goes after the game is over? Right.

So the question is why we would assume that someone in Nairobi or Baltimore or Accra or Venice Beach (or anywhere?) would want to walk around wearing a rejected NY Mets 199 World Series Champions t-shirt (again, I am not a sports person), except for maybe a few highly ironic Procell customers? Well, no one - but the assumption is that anyone poorer than you would just be happy to have a t-shirt. Et voila: guilt free donations.

And ultimately what this comes down to is the Global North’s belief that poverty is a moral failing, a character flaw, a prison designed simply by lack of self-determination and not intersecting systems of oppression, and this is a narrative that exists in order to keep us from prompting any substantial systemic changes that might allow people anywhere to break free of poverty. But additionally, it informs our personal purchases, because we have been groomed to believe that once we are done with something, no matter how much pomodoro sauce we got on it or how poorly made it was in the first place, someone less fortunate than we will want it, somewhere in the world, either a local representative of our lack of social safety net or a person from the “third world” whom we have seen monolithically depicted in the media as suffering, sickly, and clearly in need of our shoulder-cutout-lycra-thong-bodysuits-from-Forever 21.

For a moment, I would like to bring this back to the Clothing Room, to help you understand what this room is and why it exists. If you are a Bowery Mission community member (which are 99.9% men), you may visit at specific hours 3x per week to enter the clothing room, choose new clothing, and shower in the adjacent bathroom. There is only room for a certain number of people to do this on each visit, and especially due to COVID precautions the whole event runs rather slowly, and can take up a good deal of your time. Most community members do not get to shower on every single one of the three days this service is available, so you also likely have not bathed within the last 24-48 hours.

You have also most likely recently waited on line for some time for food, and if you found three meals that day that means they waited on three lines. Food bank and prepared meals demand has, as I mentioned, skyrocketed of late, which means that if you didn’t get there early and stand on line, there may not be food left for you, and there is not a bevy of food trucks to walk to if one runs out.

If you have located a shelter that you find safe, you need to start queueing for that shelter in the late afternoon - again, remember that every wait time has been further bloated by COVID precautions - taking even more of your time. If you are on any form of government assistance, you also need to periodically visit the HRA office, which typically takes up your entire day and means you cannot wait in line for food or housing. So the day you file paperwork is usually not a day you eat.

Even if you are not consistently unhoused, a single day of a life like this is disruptive, disturbing, and unhealthy. If you have a moment, read this article by Vanity Fair about the new Netflix film Maid, or one of its reference articles about a poverty simulator exercise that demonstrates what it is like to be financially unstable and reliant on government aid in this country. There. Is. No. Escape.

And with all that known, you select your fresh clothing from the Clothing Room in the Bowery Mission, picking through for something durable and comfortable, and increasingly as the temperatures drop, warm, and while picking out a knit cap you stumble across this donation, made by a local New Yorker:

We give people information about the way we perceive their value through the way we relate to them, and in this moment a stranger has related to a person in need by donating a leather and rhinestone-trimmed size Small felt beret in the “warm winter hats” pile.

In parallel thought, as we have seen the nation of Haiti struggling enormously this year with political turmoil and climate crisis-related weather disasters, and the U.S. ponders what limited aid it provides directly to Haiti, some historians and editors have posited that the best way for the U.S. to contribute would be for us to pay Haiti upwards of $10 billion dollars in reparations for the land and resources we stole from them 170 years ago.

Yes, they would surely appreciate other kinds of aid as well, but when we look at the state of affairs there or in any oppressed individual or community large or small, we can either try to resolve what is systemically keeping them from safety and security, or we can… donate a rhinestone beret. 

This Fall I have started working more closely with One Love Community Fridge, a fridge network that emphasizes the importance of making high nutritional value food available to anyone for absolutely free. Community fridges, much like apparel donation spaces, are a mix of corporate and personal donations, which means that unless there is manpower devoted to securing reliable and high quality donation, the results can be kind of a mixed bag. The reason I am working with this particular group, aside from my love for the people running it, is to address exactly this issue - restoring the dignity to community donations and providing a simple boost to someone who needs it in that moment.

Ultimately, these organizations and the results of their work come down to individual decision making. I am usually very wary of discussing this concept, because the individual responsibility narrative has been weaponized by government and Big Oil to avoid changing the macro level damage they make on a second-to-second basis with their actions. Me not buying a top from H&M doesn’t mean H&M will stop producing an estimated 3 billion articles of clothing per year. But I can rethink the way I shop, and what I buy, and what I think happens to that thing at the end of its life. And when I couple that with being extremely loud on whatever platform I have about consumer and constituent preferences, that is as much power as I personally have. So I have to use it. Please use yours, too!

Happy weekend to everyone, except for the person who donated that rhinestone Wang beret to a homeless shelter.

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