But HELLO – there are about a thousand other worthy causes out there right now. Did you know that year-end fundraising gets so buck wild because folks with lots of money need to donate before the end of the year for tax purposes, and the rest of us get caught up in the whirlwind.

In this post I’ve collected ten organizations I believe in fiercely enough to give time or money to, and tell you a bit about them. They are categorized into Media Justice, Movement Building, and Progressive Leadership Development.

Our Resources, Our Disbursements*

Now that I can regularly afford groceries and postage and rent AND going to the doctor occasionally, I budget in** a little bit of redistribution of wealth to my holiday season. Because come early Jan, I will probably feel broke again even though I might not technically be [ps. please don't run around saying "I'm broke!" unless you truly are, ya hear?] and thus I know I need to disburse some of these resources now.

So whether you got a cute check from your family, or an unexpected gig, or a year-end bonus that you don’t have to throw directly onto the interest on your student loans [sigh] — this is a great time to find an organization or cause that it would be actually useful to put money towards, money that might otherwise go to taxis, boxing day sales, or into the void of banking fees. Plus perhaps you have friends who are fund raising for programs, surgeries, travel, etc. If everyone who had it threw $10 at a project, we’d move mountains of money a little bit at a time.

MEDIA JUSTICE

It is sad that $pread Magazine can not be on this list, so please, a moment of silence for an all-volunteer, sex-worker-and-ally-run indie magazine that made it over FIVE years before closing shop. [           ]. If you want to donate and get a magazine subscription in exchange, let me suggest instead the solid and smart Left Turn.

Democracy Now – “Dear Amy Goodman, Thank you for making going to my often-boring temp jobs more bearable by sending your authoritative voice over the radio, tv and internet waves five days a week all year long. Thank you for creating Left/Progressive Talking Points and resisting the  I really fucking appreciate everything. Here’s $25.”

Also the online news source, The Electronic Infantida, who “publishes news, commentary, analysis, and reference materials about the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict from a Palestinian perspective.”

FLOODLINES: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six is a “firsthand account of community, culture, and resistance in New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina”. Order it. It also happens to be written by Jordan Flaherty, a writer/editor of Left Turn and also one of the most fierce media justice activists and POC allies I’ve had the pleasure of knowing.

MOVEMENT BUILDING

The U S Social Forum — perhaps you made it there this June or perhaps you are wishing you did. Supporting events and orgs AFTER their big event is one of the kindest things you can do, because followup and cleanup sucks, yet it must be done, *especially* if we want to see another one of these Convergences [we do]. PLUS for $25 you get a tshirt! win!

Critical Resistance – This is one of the only [*the* only?] activist org in the country who works full-time to dismantle the Prison/Industrial Complex, and they just lost a major source of funding. Every bit will in fact help them.

The Femme Collective – it’s never too early to donate to the Femme Conference for 2012. Oh – and don’t forget to fill out the survey if you went to the Conference!

PROGRESSIVE LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

You can go LOTS of places to learn how to bank and shop quietly and never acknowledge your priviledge or get tools to fight oppression. That’s called Leaving The House. These next few orgs empower individuals to do more with themselves, in many awesome ways.

FIERCE “is proud to be one of the few organizations that empowers LGBTQ youth of color to take action and create the better world we yearn for and imagine.” and they’ve been doing so for TEN years!

Also amazing, also working to empower youth of color include Safe Outside the System, a “an anti-violence Collective led by and for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Two Spirit, Trans, and Gender Non Conforming people of color. We are devoted to challenging hate and police violence by using community based strategies rather than relying on the police” working through the Audre Lorde Project.

Streetwise & Safe works with queer youth of color who are criminalized for association with sex trade work. *Note there’s a $50 minimum donation.

The Catalyst Program — focuses on movement-building specifically across race and on teaching White people how to wield all that unearned privilege. This is who runs the Anne Braden Program, too.

OTHERWISE

You don’t have to have or use money to give to or be involved with social change, as you know. Your time, spreading the word about a project or organization, and adding your voice are all also critical.

*I don’t know about you, but I get a weird feeling in the back of my windpipe when I want to talk about money in any way whatsoever, which is exactly the feeling that tells me I need to not be quiet.

**I think from growing up poor I became a manically excellent budgeter. Is anyone else like that? I hear it can go several ways but I’m too busy with my spreadsheets and tiny notepapers covered in calculations to really check in with Other People’s Banking. I like to budget one pro-bono client a month as a donation to Social Justice Work, and the income from one client at the end of the year towards economic redistribution. It’s kind of tidy that way for me but again no one else ever need be that anal.

INFORMATION

About Image Size for Printing:

The internet is great because it gives us access to all kinds of images of ourselves and others, but tragically for the print-minded among us, most of the images found on the internet [like most of what's on Facebook, or the small images on Flickr] are NOT suitable for printing. These web-optimized images have been scaled down to contain only 72 “Dots” [also called pixels] of color information Per Inch [eg. "dpi", also called "resolution"]. Thats perfect for a computer monitor, but for a medium or big pic in a magazine, flyer, brochure, etc, really for any print instance, we need to get images that are 300 dpi or greater — 4 times more dense with color information as web-optimized images! — to look good to our eye when printed on paper, and not blurry and “pixelated”, like when you see something looking all choppy with the little squares in it.

What does that mean and how do you know?

If you  have an image file that you want to use for print, but aren’t sure if it’s dpi is correct, open that file in your image editing software [try PC: Paintbrush; Mac: Preview, iPhoto; PC/Mac: Photoshop, GIMP]  and look at the image size information, however your program gives you that info*. It will tell you how many actual dots of image data [pixels] are in your image, what the current setting on the image is, and how big that is in inches. You can do some simple math to see how big it would be on a computer versus printed, by dividing the number of pixels by the output method [web or printing].

An example:
A camera phone may take a 600 wide x450 tall pixel picture, which you then copy onto and then open on your computer. *In the program you open it in, there will be a drop-down menu called ‘Tools’ or ‘Edit’. Pick that, and then “Get Info” or “Image Size” and a window will open, telling you lots of info, including that the image is 600×450.

In print terms, that picture is 2in. x 1.5in [600/300 dpi for print=2in; 450/300=1.5in]. Small for a magazine or postcard, probably ok for a brochure. For reference, an image that is 750×600 is about the ‘print size’ of a playing card.

That same picture is in web terms sizes out to be 8.3×6.25 [600/72 dpi for web=8.3; 450/72=6.25, or big enough for a computer screen!].

For printing, we need images that are 300 pixels per inch, cuz that’s what printers print at. For your postcard and magazine needs, try to find/take/get images that are at LEAST 1200×900 or bigger [4x3 inches]. A full page image needs to be 2850×3600 pixels [9.5x12]. A brochure image should be NO smaller than 450×450 [1.5 inches square]. We want to see your brilliant face!

Resizing:

Please DONT “Resize” or “Upsample” options to resize an image from smaller to larger!!!!! That’s how you can guarantee your pic will come out with all the weird little squares when printed.

You can’t just use the “Resample” or “Resize” tool for print purposes, because doing so asks the computer program to make guesses [using math!] to fill in the missing image data from all the pixels that aren’t there, and that’s when you get images that print looking  what is called “pixelated”, because you can see the individual edges of pixels. That’s BAD]. That’s why you want large original images to work from.

You can “downsample,” that is, go DOWN in size, because your computer is not missing any image data information, it’s only cutting out the extra. That’s ok. But if someone is asking you for an image for printing, just send them the biggest thing you have. They will  downsize as needed.

Oranization

When you send someone who runs a magazine or a conference called, say, Lick The Moist Cherry, a picture or bio, you might be tempted on your computer, to name your picture or bio “Lick The Moist Cherry” — so that you know what it’s for — and email it away. Not only is that awkward, at least 30 other people are naming their images and bios the same thing and sending it to that organizer, who now has 30 Lick The Moist Cherrys, and no time for her own cherry because she has to rename everything that gets sent her.

Do these nice people a favor. Save the image or document as your name, or the name of your troupe, or your presentation title. It will save someone a headache, I promise.

**a note about file extensions. Unless you are a “computer” person, don’t change a .jpg to a .gif or a .doc to a .txt willynilly. Leave it be and it will be better than if you get all cray. Also don’t delete the extension accidentally, they help the other person’s computer know what it’s looking at. If you are a graphics person, you know that .tif or .pdf are preferred delivery formats for print.

Example:

• picture: DamienLuxe_LTMC.jpg [I've used an underscore - _ - because it helps Macs and PCs read the filename easier than if you leave spaces]
• bio: DamienLuxe_bioLTMC.txt – [I also anally appended the acronym of the event this bio is for, so I know from my computer what I sent it to.]

CLEAR, DIRECT INSTRUCTIONS

- get your pic onto a computer

- look at the size

- make sure it’s ‘big’ enough for your purposes

- save it with an obvious name [your name_event.xxx]

- email it with an obvious subject line in the email

- sit back satisfied, knowing you did your best

RESOURCES

Today, we look at file sharing. Getting a large media file from my computer/camera/etc. to your email/social network/website/etc.

1. Email that sucker! Is it a sample of a picture for your CD cover or a draft of your latest song?? It’s probably small enough to email.

+ fast and dirty
- giant files clog up people’s email *especially* if their email runs off their website [me@mywebstie.com] and not giant email metropolises like gmail.
- now you have a hundred copies of your image/song/video out there, and maybe you don’t want that because it was a draft or a version that will be changed and that gets confusing [this is called version control! by the way].

2. use yousendit.com – it’s like a single-use email account for really big files, where you set up an account and people use yousendit to create a link that the reciever can click to download the big file.

+ send up to 100MB files
- only 100MB [not great for video]
- you have the file-duplication problem from email, though at least not in your email
- links you send people only last for one week unless you sign up for an account [$]

3. Use a server and FTP software to transfer the file, then send a link - doing this you basically make a “webpage” that is only the media item you want to share [the "page" is an automatically embedded  image, song or video file].  For example: http://www.hadassahsbizzare.com/mp3/Craigslist.mp3. That page is just the song, and I can send the link to people to say, “hey! isn’t Craigslist dating tragic? Listen!”

+ upload any size file and send people a URL [web address, readable in a browser]
- you need to have your own website server space**
- uses your servers’ bandwith
+/- You’ll need FTP [File Transfer Protcol] software. Your server might have a WebFTP or httpFTP [which might limit the size of files you can upload to 5 ot 10MB, smaller than gmail, so check  it out]

FTP software looks like this

. You can download Cyberduck FTP software, it’s free+ great if you’re on a Mac, or try download.com for free PC FTP software.

**You can get a free website account, however, and just use it for files that you need to share. A bit annoying because of all the sign-up time? Sure. Free. Oh heck, yeah.

4. burn a DVD/CD or use a portable drive

+ maybe the cheapest method
- you have to physically hand it off [with the drive, anyway] or mail it.

If any of you have better or other suggestions, I’d love to hear them! In short, it’s so awesome that we have videos and songs and giant pictures to share, but does get a little sticky when our work gets large.

• Silas, Heather and Leah are all really talented in different arenas so we make up a really interesting teaching team – covering theatre, writing, video, DIY booking, community healing, web and audio production…
• And because of that, each of us *performs* really differently, too. Silas’ piece on Hollywood, quistory and integrity; Heather’s highly performative work on loss; Leah’s multimedia razor word work…and the Hot Pink Jesus Trash work I’m bringing is some of my best, creating magic out of dirt and shame.

We decided to change the name to How To Build A Fire, because that really reflected what we are accomplishing with this project — by pairing our performances with “how-to” interactive workshops and/or lectures that offer practical, hands-on techniques, our participants are encouraged to deepen their critical anlayses of cultural production, and will walk away with a collection of  techniques, tools and technology necessary to create artistic work and sustainable community projects in their own communities — with the ability to build their own fires!

My new post: “I did it!”

Customizing a blog to look almost exactly like an existing site is no small feat. And what, I did it, after several annoying hours with PHP and CSS and the DIY attitude that got me here in the first place – yay for DIY!!

This got me thinking on other things that I cast in my skill set net which are special: parallel parking a conversion van, customized rope body harnesses, troubleshooting the A/V, designing/producing print media for the revolution. And that was just today. What kinds of things are *you* especially good at – and when do you use them?