February 3, 2025

2024: lots of work behind the work

2024 was a challenging year — Affect struggled with a lot of change behind the scenes and had to work hard to keep things running smoothly.

This is a long wrap-up, so if you want to skip to a particular section:

• Mourning
• Org matters
• Highlights
• Looking to 2025

Mourning

One of Affect’s first Disabled And Here participants, Tonya Jones, passed in early 2024. Tonya was prolific in the zine community and founded the Women of Color Zine collective in Portland. She was a deeply thoughtful writer, feminist community organizer, and single mother.

It’s been a year since cancer stole her away, and we continue to miss Tonya’s presence in the world.

Org matters

On February 28, Open Collective Foundation, Affect’s fiscal sponsor¹, suddenly announced that they were closing down. They also asked for a transition plan by April.

We scrambled to find a new fiscal sponsor on the tight deadline, and landed with the SPM Disability Justice Fund (SPM DJF). Though we’re grateful for their support, SPM DJF didn’t quite have the capacity we need, and Affect is now transitioning into a fiscal sponsorship with the Autistic Women & Nonbinary Network (AWN).

On a practical level, repeatedly moving fiscal sponsors has been time-consuming and expensive². With things so in flux, we skipped end of the year fundraising, stuck to applying for general operating grants, and had to push back the Community Care Awards.

Thankfully, with leftover funds from Northwest Health Foundation’s 2022 grant and a surprise new multi-year grant from the Disability Visibility Project, we actually had a $15,000 budget in 2024, with $12,000 of that reserved for (and spent on) Disabled And Here.

Even though 2024 was our best year in terms of website and social media reach (huge thanks to the Instagram reposters!), our individual donations fell to just $536.

Highlights

Now for what we accomplished: Disabled And Here grew the series with 35 new images – including 2 illustrations – and 5 participant interviews!

Thanks to grant support, we not only hosted a solo participant shoot, but were able to coordinate a group shoot at an indoor-outdoor ADA-accessible space, with the theme “Together, We Mask.”

We got to increase the amount we pay Disabled And Here collaborators, with photoshoot participants now getting $475 each and disabled illustrators receiving $700 per image. And we continued implementing COVID-safe practices in-person, with regular COVID testing, masking, and air purifiers.

Looking to 2025

Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture, these are rough times. Affect ultimately exists to amplify multiply marginalized people of color and advocate for disability justice, and that feels more relevant than ever in the face of rising facism and eugenics.

We want to start off 2025 by thanking community carers, so after an unintentionally long hiatus, the Community Care Awards will open nominations later this month!

There will also be another masked Disabled And Here group shoot in the works, but as a disabled-led project, we need to prioritize some rest in between so we can keep our capacity up in the long run.

If our work resonates with you, Affect has a new donation page through AWN and any and all contributions would be a huge help!