Hi everyone! I'm new here, so perhaps I have missed a resource on the forum that can help me with this and I hope it is OK to post this question. Since a few months I have been helping to run a mutual aid page on Instagram that takes requests from all over the world. A few things have struck me in the past months while working on this:
- The majority of requests are coming from Black people in the US.
- We have very few white American followers.
- Most of our followers are young (18-24), Black/Brown/Indigenous/Asian, queer, neurodivergent, or otherwise marginalised.
Basically, it looks to me like funds are being passed around within a group of people that already has little wealth to go around, and I think we need to get more wealthy white Americans to donate. I frequently donate to homeless people in the US that we get requests from myself, but as a Dutch person it does feel odd to have to be sending funds to literally the richest country on earth because Americans don't take care of their own. I was wondering whether people on this forum have any experience getting white, wealthy, older generations on board? Thanks!
Thanks for your reply! I'm definitely noticing this in all the mutual aid spaces I'm involved in, and what concerns me the most is that most followers are very young (18-24 years old)! Obviously, these are not the kind of people that are able to commit to for example donating $100 to someone in need on a monthly basis. What I'm not sure about is whether this is because the networks I'm involved in are mostly based on Instagram, or whether it's a trend in mutual aid networks in general. Social media is ideally positioned to connect wealthy folks with those in need, though, and it doesn't seem to me that many wealthy white suburbanites are going out of their way to establish mutual aid networks offline locally. If somebody knows of a specific example of a mutual aid network in which wealthy white donors are predominantly active, though, I'd be super interested to hear about it!