Support Feministing’s work: A message from Jos

Feministing Executive Directors Maya Dusenbery, Jos Truitt, and Lori Adelman.

Feministing Executive Directors Maya Dusenbery, Jos Truitt, and Lori Adelman

Feministing needs your help. We need to raise $30,000 in the next month to continue bringing you the feminist news, analysis, and ways to take action you love. Over the next month, members of the Feministing crew will be sharing stories about the work they do. If you agree with us that it’s important and impactful work, please support us by donating to Feministing

I’ve worked at Feministing for almost six years now, first as a writer and then as an editor. I didn’t expect to be at the site this long – I thought I’d step aside to make room for younger voices. And I have, but not in the way I anticipated; I’ve moved from writing on the site regularly to running development.

When Maya, Lori, and I took on leadership, we wanted to focus on doing the work we were already doing better — giving our writers more space to explore complex issues and a serious editorial process to support their work. And we wanted to continue prioritizing voices that have traditionally been marginalized within feminism. I realized the best thing I could do to support this work was to shift my efforts to building Feministing into a sustainable organization —  setting us up so we’d be able to take tax deductible donations, and creating the infrastructure we need to fund the work we do.

At Feministing, diversity is front and center when we’re recruiting new writers. Our crew talks deliberately and directly about the voices, issues, and experiences that we see as under-represented even within feminism. Feministing is a gateway to the feminist movement for so many young people, who first learn about what feminism can be, beyond tired stereotypes, from us. That means we have a lot of power to help shift and expand the movement’s focus by centering marginalized issues and perspectives.

That’s a power we take very seriously. For example, when I joined Feministing, we couldn’t write about immigration without getting tons of backlash from readers saying it wasn’t a feminist issue — and even suggesting that immigrants were stealing jobs from women in the US. We addressed this deliberately through both content and recruitment of writers actively engaged in the immigration justice movement. The place of the immigrants rights movement within feminism has shifted significantly since then, and I’m proud to have seen some of that happen on our site.

The biggest challenge to recruiting a diverse team we’ve faced is money. We don’t have VCs knocking down our door begging to fund a site that cares more about uplifting marginalized voices than pageviews. We are working hard to build a sustainable Feministing, but it’s an uphill climb for a site that started as an unpaid labor of love. We haven’t been able to recruit all the trans women we want because they can’t do underpaid work. And asking someone to cover labor issues without decent pay? Just doesn’t work.

That’s why I’m working to fund Feministing. Moving to a model where everyone’s getting paid for their work isn’t just what’s fair for our current crew of diverse and amazing writers who have worked for small stipends for so long — it will also help us better do our part in ensuring that the feminist movement reflects as many issues, experiences, and perspectives as possible.

Thank you!

Boston, MA

Jos Truitt is Executive Director of Development at Feministing. She joined the team in July 2009, became an Editor in August 2011, and Executive Director in September 2013. She writes about a range of topics including transgender issues, abortion access, and media representation. Jos first got involved with organizing when she led a walk out against the Iraq war at her high school, the Boston Arts Academy. She was introduced to the reproductive justice movement while at Hampshire College, where she organized the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program’s annual reproductive justice conference. She has worked on the National Abortion Federation’s hotline, was a Field Organizer at Choice USA, and has volunteered as a Pro-Choice Clinic Escort. Jos has written for publications including The Guardian, Bilerico, RH Reality Check, Metro Weekly, and the Columbia Journalism Review. She has spoken and trained at numerous national conferences and college campuses about trans issues, reproductive justice, blogging, feminism, and grassroots organizing. Jos completed her MFA in Printmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute in Spring 2013. In her "spare time" she likes to bake and work on projects about mermaids.

Jos Truitt is an Executive Director of Feministing in charge of Development.

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