The 3-Tiered Tuition System (Launching 2023)

Everyone from a range of financial positions is invited to be involved in Feminism School. The 3-Tiered Tuition system applies to Feminism School cohorts and group workshops.

  • Mutual Aid Tuition

    This tier most directly benefits those who do undervalued labor within capitalism, including activists, artists, anyone challenging the status quo, and those doing care labor.

  • Sustainability Tuition

    If you live on one income and your net worth covers basic expenses, this is probably the tier for you.

  • Feminist Redistribution of Resources Tuition

    If you benefit from capitalism, marriage, owning property, intergenerational wealth, and /or having access to two solid incomes, this is likely the tier for you.

***

Tier I: Mutual Aid Tuition (chosen price, chosen currency of exchange outside of a money economy)
Many people do the forms of labor in the world that are severely undervalued by capitalism. The Mutual Aid Tuition is for people who do not receive the financial benefits of capitalism, but rather deal with the sufferings and exploitations of capitalism in an on-going way. People needing Mutual Aid Tuition do not have extra money from partners of families and were not given wealth and assets. They live on their own wage labor in a system designed to support wealth and keep people in wage labor in daily exhaustion.
 
The Mutual Aid Tuition is often a good path to feminist study for single moms, women from the global south, and people living with disabilities who cannot work. If your body, health, and energy are regularly taxed from insecure access to affordable housing, food, childcare, and medical care, the Mutual Aid Tuition is the right fit for you. In the Mutual Aid Tuition, we consider the right investment for you and explore forms of non-money currency you might select as your investment.


***

Tier II: Sustainability Tuition (set  partially scholarshipped price based on U.S. dollar, but please adjust for other currencies)
This is tuition price needed for Feminism School’s research, operating costs, administrative labor,  business expenses, independent contractors, and teaching to be sustainably funded. 

If you have secure housing, secure food, and access to regular paychecks—but you don’t have added resources from owning property or other investment portfolios, nor do you financially benefit from a partner's added salary—this tuition is probably right for you. In this tier you have enough to meet your and loved ones basic needs, but your life's resources, including housing, are tied to wage labor (not intergenerational wealth, marriage, or property). You probably have a limited savings account for emergencies, such that paying full price in Tier III would harm your access to a financial safety net. 


***

Tier III: Feminist Redistribution of Resources Tuition (full price or chosen price above)
This tier is designed for people who have very secure access to housing, savings, and retirement. You probably have property (instead of having to rent). Paying full price on tuition would not effect your access to paying your basic bills or harm the savings you need available for emergencies.
 
In addition, this tier is especially a fit for people who 1) have gained access to stability or wealth through property investment or 2) through marriage and combining financial resources with another adult or 3) through inheritance, the three most significant routes people get access to the benefits of capitalism. 

If you will be using Feminism School teachings to support an already financially successful business platform, Tier 3 also has each participant evaluate a fair monetary exchange given the context of how our research at Feminism School will be used in another's business or public platform. 

 

***

Please note that Mentor-Scholar spots are not yet part of the 3-Tiered-Tuition.

The Mentor-Scholar Program spots are designed to help people with platforms and financially solid businesses go much deeper into understanding lineages in feminist theory, trauma studies, and ethnic studies/critical race theory. The Mentor-Scholar Program is built for people who did not pursue graduate level training, but who have built careers and vocations where the research methods of Feminism School would support deepening their work.

Feminism School recognizes the prices of this 1:1 program are accessible only to the wealthier segments of society, or to institutions that have support for professional development. The time and energy that goes into mentoring and consulting with individuals requires the long-time research and teaching efforts are fully compensated.

That said, The Mentor-Scholar Program supports the overall research labors of Feminism School, and therefore directly supports the capacity for other forms of programming that are accessible to more people.

If you are in this program, you are contributing to the overall sustainability of Feminism School research and teaching, and directly supporting the research labor that will allow the content (including the books being written) to reach more people.

9 Principles of Feminist Economic Justice

1. Money is one form of currency—an important form, but not the only form. Feminism School recognizes and celebrates diverse forms of currency and creative and spiritual power.


2. We name and teach how capitalism builds wealth on the labor of Black people, people of color, poor white people, the unpaid domestic and reproductive labor of women, and on the ongoing theft of Indigenous land and waterways. Capitalism also builds wealth on utter disregard for the planet. Nothing about this system is right or just. 

Feminism School will continue to teach and educate people to understand how the oppressions of racial patriarchal capitalism work and what a decolonial economy based in reciprocity with one another and reciprocity with the earth could mean. 

We don't just live in the space of critiquing capitalism: rather, we fall in love with imagining and practicing a worldview based in generosity, reciprocity, and sustainability of the earth and ourselves.


3. We believe Feminism School classes should not cost the same for every person or every institution who hires us because some people are living lives crushed by capitalism and other people are living lives buoyed by capitalism. Furthermore, services already do not cost the same for every person because poor people pay more than wealthy people for goods and services.

  • If you don’t have money, you pay high interest on student loans,  groceries, medical emergencies, and on business loans. You pay high rent on short-term housing.  Everyday, if you don't have money, you pay more for things than people with wealth.
  • If you can’t afford medical care, a toothache becomes a far more expensive root canal years later. Buying cheap shoes that wear out or hurt your back is more expensive over time than being able to buy one good pair of shoes that lasts and doesn't harm your body.
  • Having to rent perpetually because you will never make enough money for a down payment or be able to get a loan means you cannot build equity and participate in capitalism's privileging of private property.

In short, services and products already do not cost the same for every person (i.e. poor people pay more than wealthy people) so let's name that reality within capitalism and start to correct for it in our feminist business practices.


4. We believe that part of understanding income inequality is questioning the financial privileging of marriage. For example, in the US tax laws, single people pay more taxes than married people. As another example, a single parent struggling to pay rent each month must exist in a market with people living in two-income homes, with access to property, savings, inheritance to buy more properties to rent, and an investment portfolio. An economic systems that so drastically privileges the already wealthy is immoral, especially toward women and single moms who for a variety of reasons cannot or choose not to participate in the (patriarchal) institution of marriage. 


5. Feminism School recognizes that giving away services for free has not in the past been sustainable, and nor have people receiving the services benefited as much as they might have if they had offered some energetic investment in their education. We are still experimenting with how to create a balance of access, reciprocity, and sustainability. 

That said, bartering services has proved to be one effective (and fun) strategy—so if you have a service you'd like to exchange, please contact us!


6. The quality feminist research and teaching we offer required decades of study, writing, devotion, coursework, and mentorships to create. Part of feminism is making visible the true cost of labor—in other words, it does not help our collective consciousness to erase from view the labor that goes into feminist research, teaching, scholarship, and social entrepreneurship. Financial investment in the services offered by Feminism School is a way of recognizing the importance of women’s labor in a world that wants women’s labor to be ever invisible to continue to be exploited.


7. Transparency and redistribution of resources matter to a feminist economy. Given the costs of the labor and research that built the intellectual offerings of Feminism School the past 17 years, we are still operating at a significant loss (over $100,000). Because everyday sustainability for Feminism School is still a challenge, the best way to redistribute financial resources has been using the platform, networks, and writing skills of Dr. George to directly fundraise for others. To that end, fundraising has been an important part of her job for a decade. Fundraising efforts have included:

  • Raising money to support the labor of Black Lives Matter activists and artists.
  • Raising money for those suffering from climate change disasters like more destructive hurricanes.
  • Raising money through Feminism School workshops where the proceeds all go to a single mom.
  • Raising money to support access to food and water at the U.S.-Mexico border.
  • Raising a 1-year stipend for a feminist PhD researcher in India during the pandemic.
  • Creating a course at Feminism School entirely for reparations. 100% of the tuition for the course Revolutionary Texts of Black Feminist History goes toward paying down Black student loan debt.


8. The goal for Feminism School is to create vibrant feminist networks across class positions and areas of expertise and collaboration. The goal is collective models of transformation, not dehumanizing individuals or groups of people.

  • Feminism School believes that economic precarity is not a moral or spiritual failing. It is not someone’s lack of ability to “manifest” basic rights that are being systematically stolen from them. A great deal of spiritual language currently on the market is a version of a health and wealth gospel that blames individuals for lack of access to material and financial resources.

  • Feminism School believes that having access to wealth is not a moral or spiritual failing. Someone is not more important or less important for having access to wealth. Many wealthy feminists did not choose to receive structural economic privilege, and they themselves need support to imagine and practice a more active role in redistribution of resources. Critiquing capitalism is not the same as demonizing people with access and wealth within the system. 

All that being said, we do need to critique and change the oppression that creates as one interlinked system both wealth and poverty. 

Part of the change is redistribution, reparations, and decolonial practices. 

Part of the change is honoring the earth and waterways and saying a collective no to wealth-building practices that destroys our planet's future. 

Part of the change is naming the systems that build wealth directly upon other people's financial precarity, such as the billionaire land-owning class creating huge profits amidst a crisis in housing.


9. We believe it is important to make visible as part of our feminist teaching that a system of economic exploitation and housing precarity is designed to create a large population of workers who are exhausted and surviving trauma. If people’s life energy is used up trying to access basic rights and survival, their talents and visionary powers and gifts lie dormant and suppressed. Their books don't get written; their art is not made; their visionary spiritual labors do not come to fruition. This is part of the collective trauma of capitalism: the suppression of people's intrinsic life energies. 

Simultaneously, this is a system also designed to produce wealthy people who are psychologically disconnected from the suffering caused by capitalism, including the suffering climate change is and will cause. 

In short, capitalism (and other class or caste-based practices, or other authoritarian, corrupt economic regimes) disconnect us, creating spiritual and material harm that affects everyone. 

A spiritually-based feminism that has any integrity must develop practices that heal at material, economic, and planetary levels.

Pricing & Economic Practices

Feminism School Economic Practices are a multi-tiered approach to create sustainability, imagination, community, and inclusion in feminist education.  These practices rest on:

1) Offering free learning resources including 30 lectures in Writing Feminist Life Together. In addition, Revolutionary Texts of Black Feminism is a self-study course that is always free to Black and Indigenous folks. It is sliding scale tuition to others. This sliding scale tuition 100% funds Black student loan debt.

2) Fundraising to support others’ gifts and callings, with a focus on supporting single moms and feminist researchers of color.

3) The  3-Tiered Tuition System for live cohorts and workshops.

How Do We Create Both Access & Sustainability at Feminism School and Beyond?

IMAGINING A FEMINIST ECONOMY is not only a commitment to inclusion AND to the sustainability of Feminism School, but it also a call to interdependence and reciprocity being at the pulsing heart of transformative, decolonial feminist practice.

 


*** 

Naming What Isn't Working in Our Patriarchal Economies

The afterlife of western colonialism and the ongoing brutal forces of capitalism have profoundly shaped global suffering, climate change, and exploitation of workers.

To be clear, capitalism is not the only form of economic oppression. Just like European colonialism is not the only form of colonialism or empire. But capitalism and western colonialism are an entwined historical system with a hugely impactful reach on the planet.

Capitalism is a system that has always required extracting labor from those most marginalized based on race, class, and gender. It also exploits the earth and water, putting the entire planet and non human life at risk.

Capitalism builds wealth on others' suffering, including future generations who will live amidst the most traumatic climate change.

Capitalism also coerces women into heteronormative marriages in order to access secure housing, money, and property.

Capitalism creates access to wealth for some, while others are systematically kept in wage labor and debt. It then shames those who are suffering, while giving status to those who most benefit from the status quo.

 

The same forces that buoy wealth for some are the same forces creating oppression, exhaustion, and suffering for others. 

 

People who have wealth —often made from access to whiteness, patriarchy, property investments, intergenerational wealth, and investment portfolios that harm the planet, etc.— will make more money from their wealth. 

But people excluded from any access to wealth must give their life's energy to wage labor, making their bodies a commodity to sell to the wealthy.

Through unfair rental markets, people excluded from wealth and property are forced to pay their earnings into a system that makes developers, corporations, and large-scale landlords wealthy. High interest debt for basic living expenses is common to survive.

In the U.S., this capitalist system is based on anti-Blackness creating white intergenerational wealth and Black poverty. It is based on exploiting (racialized) immigrant labor. It is all founded on settler colonialism, which stole land from Indigenous nations and made the earth itself property to own, sell, and profit from, directly leading to climate change. 

For capitalism to exist also requires patriarchy—a system that normalizes intimate everyday exploitation of women's bodies and labor.

*** 

No one individual can fix this level of oppression and disconnection from the planet and one another. 

But, as a community, we can experiment with and practice otherwise economies from the status quo. 

Feminism School is ever experimenting with (and inviting others’ imaginations) of what is possible if we resist the belief systems and everyday practices of colonialism, patriarchy, classism, and capitalism.

 

*** 

Claiming the Power to Create Alternative Feminist Economies

How could we make feminist history—caring better for one another and the planet?

What is possible if we imagine outside the status quo beliefs and separations of capitalism? 

What forms of collective healing and unfurling of people’s gifts might be unleashed? 

What kind of everyday joy could become abundant? 

 

*** 

Feminism is about supporting empowerment in communities. 

It is about restructuring the basics of how a society operates and whose labor society acknowledges and rewards. 

Feminism is also a lens from which to understand how patriarchal systems are interlinked to all forms of domination, including domination of the earth.

Feminism is lived in practices that take risks on imagining alternatives to the status quo. 

Those alternatives must be grounded in concrete realities of who gets access to housing, who gets access to rest, who gets access to to medical care, who gets access to intellectual and creative time, and who gets access to green space and clean water.