Quick thought re: activities

[randomling]

How about something like a one-activity-per-post system?

For example:
Suggested activity: Sign this petition / donate to this cause/fundraiser / submit an article(/story/poem/piece of art/wevs) to X submission call / attend X event / whatever

Possibly followed by the submitter filling in a short form, like:
Link:
Location: (for meatspace events)
Time estimate: (5 minutes, an evening, whatever) (Possibly we could have a classification system, something like: short, under 10 mins, medium, under an hour, long, under a day, very long, something that takes sustained effort over days or weeks?)
Deadline: (eg petitions and fundraisers are likely to have a closing date)
Does this require me to: leave the house?, spend money?, expend mental spoons (eg: writing something)?, expend social spoons (eg making a phone call, show up in a chatroom)?, make a decision (eg how much to donate)?, reveal personal information (eg petitions sometimes require full name and postal/zip code)?

Mods could then show up and tag submissions depending on the contents of the form or perhaps our own research if some questions are left unanswered. Maybe that could be a once-a-day thing? Then we'd have a nice searchable archive of things-to-do.

(For actions with a deadline, we could tag them "current" and "deadline" or something, and have a mod scroll through current+deadline things every now and then to take "current" off the ones that have expired.)

Brainstorming questions:
* Does this seem like a good idea?
* How would you modify it to work better?
* What other tags might we add to make the list more accessible?
* How to organise tag moderation so that tag-modding is also reasonably accessible?

Answer any, all or none - just saying hi is fine!

Idea: holiday gift activism

[untonuggan]

My sister told me Sunday that she wants donations to Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, or the social justice organization of my choice for the holidays. (see: this list from Jezebel)

For the smol people in my life, I'm planning on gifting books with diverse characters (by diverse creators). resources on where to find diverse books

Consider also purchasing gifts from Black-owned businesses, and boycotting companies that do business with and/or back the Trump family.

It's a small thing, and won't cure everything, but for me it's doable. I have to do holiday shopping anyway, and I don't have oodles of spare cash floating around to make donations and buy holiday things and pay my own bills. (I figure excess credit card debt right now is probably just fueling the Trump train, so.)

This is a thing I can do.

My own holiday wish list includes some diverse books/media, and also donations. Possibly yarn for charity knitting? I doubt I can get my brother to break away from buying-from-Amazon, but perhaps other people in the family will.

change.org petition: Support the homeless on their period

[randomling]

Sorry, no formal posting template has been sorted out yet!

Periods are annoying on a good day. But they are a whole lot more difficult to deal with when you don't have a home or a bathroom or funds for sanitary products. That's the reality for THOUSANDS of homeless women everyday. But there's something we can do to change that. Period.

Sanitary products are kind of difficult to come by. Homeless shelters do not always provide them and the few public bathrooms that offer them, do so at a price. We are calling on Procter & Gamble, the multinational consumer goods company that produces ‘Always’ sanitary pads and ‘Tampax’ tampons, to uphold their self-proclaimed 'responsibility charter' by changing this. Now. We want them to donate a small but REALLY important proportion of their sanitary products to homeless shelters across the United Kingdom: a programme that would benefit so many vulnerable people.

This is specifically lobbying for Procter & Gamble, who manufacture Always and Tampax, to donate a proportion of their sanitary products to homeless shelters in the UK. I think it's a great idea, and I think lobbying for corporations to do their bit in general is a good plan.

Link: Go here to sign the petition.
Time estimate: 2 mins
Needed: personal information (name, email, country, street address, post code; I haven't tested whether they let you leave any of this stuff out)
There is an option to donate to the campaign after you sign the petition (needed: money, decision-making)