ABOUT EQUITY BUDGETING

Equity Budgeting is a full-ecology model for project & program budgeting for community-collaborative outreach, engagement, & co-curation projects, rooted in the understanding that economic justice is a critical requirement for racial & other social justices.

The Equity Budgeting model insists on fair pay for both community collaborators on a project (including, for oral history & folklife projects, documented/interviewed artists & memory-keepers) as well as fair pay for cultural workers & staff on a project — with a special focus on unsalaried, freelance, independent, community-based or precarious cultural workers. Equity Budgeting is a set of principles & praxes to approach budgeting — organizational, grant, project budgeting — but it also is a set of praxes & ethics that extends to other forms of project labor: including negotiations around project & materials ownership, rights, crediting/consent, & ethics & expectations around collaboration. Equity Budgeting also asks practitioners to consider the ethics of accessible community & collaborator engagement for the long life of a project — after the period of grant funding ends — as well as provisions for allowing, & funding, equitable community & collaborator participation in derivative works from community-based collaborative projects, be they documentaries & edited media works, peer-reviewed scholarly publications or presentations, or other models. Equity Budget is a corrective to longstanding extractive models of non-profit & university engagement with working-class, BIPOC, & other marginalized communities that proactively enters reparative, redistributive models of justice. Your budget is about choices; and the choices you make in budgeting — no matter what your organization says in its PR — show your organization’s ethics & commitments. Equity Budgeting demands practicing equity at — and beyond — the budget line. If you care about it, you can move $$ to make it happen.

Equity Budgeting, as a praxis & movement, goes beyond just “budgeting.” It encompass three broad spheres of practice that are critically interrelated in community-based cultural & other movement work:

  • Paying Everyone More — including, above all else, roles, positions, & types of labor that have been historically un-funded or underfunded in your industry: whether student labor, volunteer/intern labor, retiree labor, community collaborator labor, narrator labor, or the highly-valued yet massively unpaid labor of DEI work & community/cultural liaisoning

  • Honoring Intellectual Property of community-collaborators, contractors, & on the ground-partners: including protecting community & contractors’ rights to intellectual property & derivative works, adopting post-custodial models instead of work-for-hire models, &, above all else: understanding & respecting community & movement praxis as theory, with or without a peer-reviewed publication!

  • Sustaining Long-Haul, Non-Extractive Relationships — including through long-term funding partnerships, trust-based philanthropy models, first rights of refusal for contractors, & more

Equity Budgeting has its roots in a variety of places. It was first named & practiced at Marion Voices Folklife + Oral History — Marion County’s countywide folklife + cultural work for social justice organization, co-founded by Jess Lamar Reece Holler & Johnnie Lewis Jackson — & was further developed as a set of workshops & a nationwide advocacy movement by Jess & oral historian/labor organizer Sarah Dziedzic of NYC. Marion Voices continues to practice & grow its equity budgeting model: through payments for all community collaborators, fair wages for all cultural workers, an innovative ownership model that protects the intellectual property of community members & cultural workers, iterative consent, & through an award-winning community scholar program that compensates community elders & advisors for their project advisory labor. Via its equity budgeting model, Marion Voices has been able to invest over $250,000 in the Marion County arts, cutural, heritage, & social justice economy since its founding in 2017.

In 2020, Jess began teaching Equity Budgeting with Sarah Dziedzic — uniting Marion Voices’ equity budgeting commitments with Jess & Sarah’s larger field-wide advocacy for fair pay for cultural workers: including through their co-chairing of the Independent Oral Historians’ Task Force for the Oral History Association (2019-2021). Since then, Equity Budgeting workshops have been offered at organizations across the United States, with alumni & collaborators going on to develop Equity Budgeting statements & models for projects far & wide.

Equity Budgeting’s combination of approaches to economic justice, intellectual property, & building ethical, non-extractive community relationships has deep roots in both movements for the fair compensation of narrators, artists, & community collaborators in the cultural arts & heritage sectors — including Danielle Dulken’s work around payment for oral history narrators — as well as in labor organizing in the cultural sphere (including freelancer organizing movements led by Jess & Sarah in the oral history world, via the Independent Practitioners’ Task Force of the Oral History Association, plus unionization across the museum/cultural work world since 2020). Most of all, equity budgeting owes a deep dept to Black-led movements for centering economic justice in cultural work: including both reparative movements that push back on, call out, & seek to redress harm from historically-white extractive organizations, and speculative post-capitalist Black movements like abolition, solidarity economics, & Afro-futurism. Equity budgeting is movement work, & says that, if your movement isn’t materially budgeting for justice, the work probably isn’t happening yet.

Equity Budgeting is about choices. We recognize the model is different than the standard operating approach of many non-profits — which rides on as much free or donated labor as possible. That said, it is absolutely sustainable: you just have to win more grants, or choose to do less in a given project so as to pay everyone more. Like movements to educate on the real cost of food or clothing, equity budgeting asks organizations, programs, & universities to recognize the true cost of the labor that has historically been treated as not worth compensating.

Equity Budgeting matters for justice work because it is a material and structural approach to justice, community engagement, & ethics of collaboration: one which insists that, unless people are paid to be a part of the conversation, your project cannot and will not be truly, reparatively accessible to working-class, BIPOC, & other marginalized community members. Slavery & indigenous dispossession sedimented tremendous unearned wealth in the hands of white people, who then hid much of that wealth in foundations, universities, & non-profits; so reparative, redistributive, economic justice approaches will be critical to dreaming more just futures.

As a movement, Equity Budgeting offers:

  • workshops

  • trainings

  • practitioner support networks

  • advocacy & sample equity budgeting statements

  • a forthcoming certification program

… as well as a dedicated program of funder advocacy & outreach, to help shift the non-profit & mission-driven world to foreground economic justice for the sustainability of all involved in movement work. We invite you to join the movement, & work to demand that we pay everybody more !!!