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What can rural and coastal Puerto Ricans teach us about thriving in times of crisis?

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Puerto Ricans are on the lookout for solutions to the worst economic and social crisis on the island in a protracted time.

Unprecedented levels of debt are creating widespread uncertainty about employment and the state’s capability provide essential services. This crisis is not going to pass in the near futurehowever the solutions could also be closer than we predict.

As cultural anthropologists, now we have spent over a decade studying the way it pertains to people’s on a regular basis lives broader social and economic processes and documented negative effects inequality. In doing so, now we have also witnessed people in Puerto Rico who “refuse to follow the rules” of capitalism. Some scholars they even argued it Caribbean individuals are experts live with the negative effects of modern capitalism and resist because one form of capitalism existed there first tested. There have been sugar plantations in the Caribbean for the reason that 18th century early models of factory labor management and capitalist trade with a European metropolis.

People living on the rural coast of Puerto Rico live the great life without necessarily accumulating material wealth and climbing the socioeconomic ladder. Examining the lives of those that have been “left behind” by the mainstream economy can provide examples of live well in turbulent times.

Diversity in times of instability

Working full-time for pay with one employer can be a superb survival strategy in times of prosperity and stability. However, this comes at the fee of reduced flexibility and resistance conditions of scarcity and uncertainty. Poor and rural people, like many coastal Puerto Ricans, have long been reliant on aid various sources of income AND income streams adapt to prolonged scarcity and uncertainty.

Puerto Ricans sometimes mix formal and informal work, taking advantage of advantages offered by the state. Take Juana, a single mother and resident of Arroyo, Puerto Rico, whom we interviewed for: 2016 study. Because our interviews are frequently conducted under a confidentiality agreement, we use pseudonyms as an alternative of the interviewees’ names.

Until her retirement, Juana worked on and off as a brief clerk at a neighborhood hospital. When she was unemployed, she cared for the youngsters of working moms in her community. Nowadays, Juana often trades produce from her small fruit and vegetable garden with neighbors in exchange for his or her work: for instance, the mechanic who repairs her automobile. One of her nephews, whom she took care of as a baby, is a spear hunter who delivers some fish or lobster to Juana’s refrigerator. Juana said:

“I don’t need or need anything. I often have greater than I do know what to do with.

Public art depicts the cultural significance of fishing in a coastal town in Puerto Rico.
Hilda Llorens, The writer provided

Central to those arrangements is investing in social relationships through gift giving, bartering and knowledge sharing.

In our work, now we have documented repeated cases where people he gave away beneficial goodsakin to fresh fish or shellfish, relatively than keeping or selling them to build up wealth. Recent research found that greater than 90 percent of fishermen on Puerto Rico’s southeastern coast routinely separate part of their catch and donate it to family, friends or neighbors in need. They select to speculate in the community relationships and solidarity.

This a form of reciprocity takes place in communities where people recognize that their well-being is dependent upon the well-being of others, not on precarious labor markets.

Building on community

In Puerto Rico, as in other places akin to New England, fishermen are likely to have relatively low incomes, but great cultural significance in their communities. Fishermen have an iconic image of independent employees who lead adventurous and arduous lifestyles to offer for his or her communities.

A fisherman from Salinas, Puerto Rico explained that he wanted to offer his grandson and grandson with an honorable occupation.

“Who will employ these children if not me? I almost never pay for boat, engine or net repairs. People fix them for me because I bring them food. I often give away fish for free or on credit, and I also provide employment to members of the commune.”

These communities often have centers that organize initiatives for residents, akin to community gardening, solar energy, home improvement workshops and summer camps for about 100 children. In 2016, Carmen, current community board chair in Salinas, Puerto Rico, told us about her summer camp:

“We charge a monthly fee of five dollars per child. We are recruiting volunteers to conduct workshops for children. We get free breakfast and lunch through the Department of Education. Otherwise, we finance the camp with our own money and donations from local companies. Community board members and parents help run the camp.”

When we asked why she thought it was necessary to prepare a summer camp for youngsters, Carmen replied, “We are a ‘poor’ community, but when we pool our time and resources, we are able to provide children with a good summer camp and teach them good values.”

Lessons from the margins

Idea from these examples it just isn’t intended to glorify poverty or lack of access to income. Instead, our work indicates that individuals in such situations were exercising their free will, learning to outmaneuver the “game” by changing the foundations and goals in order that that they had a greater likelihood of winning.

People living in the depths of a modernizing world have long realized the unreliability of jobs in industries akin to pharmaceuticals, energy and corporate tourism, where jobs come and go along with economic cycles. Local employees are sometimes the last hired and the primary to be fired and have the so-called the bottom paid and more dangerous jobs.

Perhaps it’s time to listen to individuals who have been considered outcasts or “backward” – Caribbean fishermen and rural farmers, mid-Atlantic fishermen and pine tar collectors, Appalachian farmers and coal employees – to grasp how they’ve created wealthy lives on the margins of the mainstream economy. Perhaps we can apply their strategies to survive in these turbulent times.

This article was originally published on : theconversation.com
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Percival Everett wins the National Book Award for his Huckleberry Finn-inspired epic “James.”

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National Book Awards, 2024 National Book Awards, 75th National Book Awards, Percival Everett, Percival Everett James, Huckleberry Finn James, James novel, James book, theGrio.com

NEW YORK (AP) – Percival Everett’s “James,” a daring reworking of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” won the National Book Award for fiction. The winner in the nonfiction category was “Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling” by Jason De León, while the finalists included Salman Rushdie’s memoir about his brutal stabbing in 2022, “The Knife.”

The youth literature prize was awarded Wednesday night to Shifa Saltaga Safadi’s coming-of-age story “Kareem Between,” and the poetry prize was awarded to Lena Khalaf Tuffah’s “Something About Living.” In the translation category, the winner was “Taiwan Travel Diary” by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King.

Evaluation panels composed of writers, critics, booksellers and other representatives of the literary community chosen from lots of of submitted entries, and publishers nominated a complete of over 1,900 books. Each of the winners of the five competitive categories received $10,000.

Everett’s victory continues his remarkable development over the past few years. Little known to readers for many years, the 67-year-old was a finalist for the Booker and Pulitzer Prizes for such novels as “Trees” and “Dr. No” and the novel “Erasure” was adapted into the Oscar-nominated “American Fiction”.

Continuing Mark Twain’s classic about the wayward Southern boy, Huck, and the enslaved Jim, Everett tells the story from the latter’s perspective and highlights how in another way Jim acts and even speaks when whites usually are not around. The novel was a finalist for the Booker and won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction last month.

“James was well received,” Everett noted during his speech.

Demon Copperhead novelist Barbara Kingsolver and Black Classic Press publisher W. Paul Coates received Lifetime Achievement Medals from the National Book Foundation, which awards the awards.

Speakers praised diversity, disruption and autonomy, whether it was Taiwanese independence or immigrant rights in the US. The two winners, Safadi and Tuffaha, condemned the years-long war in Gaza and U.S. military support for Israel. Neither mentioned Israel by name, but each called the conflict “genocide” and were met with cheers – and more subdued reactions – after calling for support for the Palestinians.

Tuffaha, who’s Palestinian-American, dedicated her award partly to “all the incredibly beautiful Palestinians this world has lost, and all the wonderful ones who survive, waiting for us, waiting for us to wake up.”

Last yr, publisher Zibby Owens withdrew support for the awards after learning that the finalists planned to sentence the war in Gaza. This yr, the World Jewish Congress was amongst critics of Coates’ award, citing partly his reissue of the essay “The Jewish Onslaught,” which was called anti-Semitic.

National Book Foundation executive director Ruth Dickey said in a recent statement that Coates was being honored for his body of labor, not for any single book, and added that while the foundation condemns anti-Semitism and other types of bigotry, it also believes in free speech.

“Anyone who looks at the work of any publisher over the course of almost fifty years will find individual works or opinions with which they disagree or find offensive,” she added.

The National Book Awards took place way back in mid-November, shortly after the election, and supply an early glimpse of the book world’s response: hopeful in the wake of Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, when publisher and honorary winner Barney Rosset predicted a “new and uplifting program.” ; grim but determined in 2016, after Donald Trump’s first victory, when fiction winner Colson Whitehead urged viewers to “be kind to everyone, make art and fight power.”

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This yr, as lots of gathered for a dinner ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in downtown Manhattan to have a good time the seventy fifth anniversary of the awards, the mood was certainly one of sobriety, determination and goodwill.

Host Kate McKinnon joked that she was hired because the National Book Foundation wanted “something fun and light to distract from the fact that the world is a bonfire.” Musical guest Jon Batiste led the crowd in a round of “When the Saints Go Marching In” and sang a couple of lines from “Hallelujah,” the Leonard Cohen standard that McKinnon somberly performed at the starting of the first “Saturday Night Live” after the 2016 election.

Kingsolver admitted that she feels “depressed at the moment”, but added that she has faced despair before. She compared truth and like to natural forces equivalent to gravity and the sun, that are at all times present whether you may see them or not. The screenwriter’s job is to assume “a better ending than the one we were given,” she said.

During Tuesday evening’s reading by the award finalists, some spoke of community and support. Everett began his turn by confessing that he really “needed this kind of inspiration after the last few weeks. In a way, we need each other. After warning that “hope just isn’t a technique,” he paused and said, “Never has a situation seemed so absurd, surreal and ridiculous.”

It took him a moment to understand that he wasn’t discussing current events, but fairly was reading James.

This article was originally published on : thegrio.com
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What is GiveTuesday? The annual day of giving is approaching

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Giving Tuesday, GivingTuesday, What is GivingTuesday, What is Giving Tuesday, #GivingTuesday, philanthropy, the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, seasonal giving, seasonal donations, charitable donations, theGrio.com

Since it began as a hashtag in 2012, Giving on Tuesdaythe Tuesday after Thanksgiving, became one of the largest collection days yr for non-profit organizations within the USA

GivingTuesday estimates that the GivingTuesday initiative will raise $3.1 billion for charities in 2022 and 2023.

This yr, GivingTuesday falls on December 3.

How did GivingTuesday start?

The hashtag #GivingTuesday began as a project of the 92nd Street Y in New York City in 2012 and have become an independent organization in 2020. It has grown right into a worldwide network of local organizations that promote giving of their communities, often on various dates which have local significance. like a vacation.

Today, the nonprofit organization GivingTuesday also brings together researchers working on topics related to on a regular basis giving. This too collects data from a big selection of sources comparable to payment processors, crowdfunding sites, worker transfer software and offering institutions donor really helpful fundstype of charity account.

What is the aim of GivingTuesday?

The hashtag has been began promote generosity and this nonprofit organization continues to advertise giving within the fullest sense of the word.

For nonprofits, the goal of GivingTuesday is to boost money and have interaction supporters. Many individuals are aware of the flood of email and mail appeals that coincide on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Essentially all major U.S. nonprofits will host fundraising campaigns, and plenty of smaller, local groups will participate as well.

Nonprofit organizations don’t have to be affiliated with GivingTuesday in any method to run a fundraising campaign. They can just do it, although GivingTuesday provides graphics and advice. In this manner, it stays a grassroots endeavor during which groups and donors participate as they please.

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Was GivingTuesday a hit?

It will depend on the way you measure success, but it surely has definitely gone far beyond initial efforts to advertise giving on social media. The day has change into an everlasting and well-known event that focuses on charitable giving, volunteerism and civic participation within the U.S. and all over the world.

For years, GivingTuesday has been a serious fundraising goal for nonprofits, with many looking for to arrange pooled donations from major donors and leverage their network of supporters to contribute. This is the start year-end fundraising peakas nonprofits strive to fulfill their budget goals for next yr.

GivingTuesday giving in 2022 and 2023 totaled $3.1 billion, up from $2.7 billion in 2021. While that is loads to boost in a single day, the trend last yr was flat and with fewer donorswhich, in accordance with the organization, is a disturbing signal.

This article was originally published on : thegrio.com
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BlaQue Community Cares is organizing a cash crowd for serious food

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QNS reports that Queens, New York-based nonprofit BlaQue Community Cares is making an effort to assist raise awareness of Earnest Foods, an organic food market with the Cash Mob initiative.

The BlaQue Cash Mob program is a community-led event that goals to support local businesses, reminiscent of grocery stores in Jamaica, by encouraging shoppers to go to the shop and spend a certain quantity of cash, roughly $20. BlaQue founder Aleeia Abraham says cash drives are happening across New York City to extend support for local businesses. “I think it’s important to really encourage local shopping habits and strengthen the connections between residents and businesses and Black businesses, especially in Queens,” she said after hosting six events since 2021.

“We’ve been doing this for a while and we’ve found that it really helps the community discover new businesses that they may not have known existed.”

As a result, crowds increase sales and strengthen social bonds for independent businesses.

Earnest Foods opened in 2021 after recognizing the necessity for fresh produce in the world. As residents struggled to seek out fresh food, Abraham defines the shop as “an invaluable part of the southeast Queens community.” “There’s really nowhere to go in Queens, especially Black-owned businesses in Queens, to find something healthier to eat. We need to keep these businesses open,” she said.

“So someone just needs to make everyone aware that these companies exist and how to keep the dollars in our community. Organizing this cash crowd not only encourages people to buy, but also shows where our collective dollars stand, how it helps sustain businesses and directly serves and uplifts our community.”

The event will happen on November 24 from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. at 123-01 Merrick Blvd in St. Albans. According to the shop’s co-owner, Earnest Flowers, he has partnered with several other Black-owned brands in the world to sell his products at the shop. Flowers is comfortable that his neighbors can come to his supermarket to purchase organic food and goods from local vendors like Celeste Sassine, owner of Sassy Sweet Vegan Treats.

At the grand opening three years ago which was visited by over 350 viewersSassine stated that the collaboration was “super, super, super exciting” to the purpose that the majority of the products were off the shelves inside hours.


This article was originally published on : www.blackenterprise.com
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