You're Ok With Me Dying.

What grows between rocks and hard places? Apparently a lot. I find myself in this space more often than I would like and somehow I constantly produce work that makes you put me in your articles, books, interviews, conversations, stages. And yet, you do not support the person behind the work. I do not need exposure, I need stable income. Anything less is a death wish. Because I am at a precipice, once again, where I am looking at eviction, houselessness, and possibly worse beyond the fall.

I am not an anomoly. Most of my conversations with brilliant Black mothers have consisted of some amount of sheer anxiety about their and their families’ survival. We are in dire times. And yet too many of you are ok with us dying. Despite this death wish, we continue to show up to the school events, the work, the family gatherings, our communities, and each other as our full selves. Imagine what we could be without the constant threat of survival? Imagine what this world could look like if the life givers were sustained? I am not speaking about survival in the theoretical sense, I am speaking about it in the very real sense: if we do not have money to feed ourselves, to house ourselves, to provide for ourselves, we die.

You’re ok with me (us) dying.

So I create interventions amidst these harsh realities. In between waking up with sometimes crippling anxiety worried about how I will pay my bills and breathing exercises to calm my nervous system, I create interventions like the Sustaining Community Fund. If you read it and you do not subscribe as a paid subscriber (even if just for one month), you’re ok with me dying.

After I drop my kid off at school, I go to meetings with people who are “interested” in my work, folks who call me brilliant and sing my praises for the work I do while fielding threatening texts from my landlord. And I breathe because my breath is the only thing keeping me here. it reminds me that I am alive beyond capitalism. And then I create tech tools like Greenish and Polibot to help the communities I live in to thrive amidst the onslaught of environmental racism and systemic exploitation. If you have not mentioned this work in rooms where money exists, if you have not asked me where and how you can donate to sustain this work, you’re ok with me dying.

I pat myself on the back for being able to afford groceries for another week after somehow paying con edison, verizon, national grid, apple, google, and all these other corporations who have an insane amount of money at their disposal. And I cry because despite my best efforts, one of my dream clients lost funding midway through our contract and is unable to pay me. This is also why I started The Sustaining Community Fund.

I sit at my altar and ask the universe and God and Spirit to show me how good it can get. I mean, I’ve gotten this far by faith, 26 years of living on my own with very little to no financial support. But truth be told, I don’t know how much longer I have to live this way. Should I be ok with dying as well?

This is grief in action. This is what processing grief in real time, without a filter looks like. You all know I am too credentialed, too capable, too good at what I do (when I get the chances to do it) to be this down bad. And yet, you’re ok with me dying.

This is what the climate crisis depends on: the slow erasure of capable people who become so inundated with survival that they have no time or resources to imagine and build toward a better future. And the way I live my life is and always has been in direct opposition to this expectation. I build, I learn, I teach, I run, I motivate, I collaborate, I gather, I build more, and I never ever give up. Imagine what I could do and create if I was sustained? Imagine.

This is what a system looks like when it works exactly as designed. Extraction rarely announces itself. It arrives as praise. It arrives as a panel invitation, a citation, a quote lifted for someone else's book. The system keeps the work and discards the worker. It runs on a loop that feeds on the people who could redesign it: keep us anxious about rent, keep us weighing groceries against Con Edison, and we never get to build the futures only we can see. Precarity is not a flaw in this system. Precarity is the function. The Sustaining Community Fund, Greenish, Polibot, the governance structures I design for funders, none of these are detours from survival. They are interventions placed where the system is most exposed, at the point where resources either reach the life givers or they do not. Sustain the people who imagine, and you change what the future is allowed to become. That is the leverage point. That is where I work, and it is where I am asking you to meet me.

Many of us feel helpless in the wake of this crisis. We feel like there are too many problems and very little solutions. We numb ourselves with social media discourse or media that spawns from the imaginations of white men. I am tired of living in white men’s imaginations. And so I create interventions for philanthropists and impact investors like governance structures and learning opportunities to expand the way they provide support to artists and vulnerable communities. I help people identify what is possible despite their (our) circumstances. And I read bedtime stories to my kid in funny voices and smile from his laughter. And then I clean the dishes, countertops, and sweep the floors. I light incense to signal to my nervous system that somehow, we made it another day. And I try to sleep knowing that tomorrow holds the possibilities of life (and deaths).

Thank you for your support. I know we are all in this together, but I would be remiss to not point out how many of you have access to resources that you could share more intentionally. So if you’re able, please like, share, and subscribe to this newsletter. If you’re curious about other ways to support my work directly, read below.

Polibot.co is a realtime regulation and policy tracker for environmental justice and redlined communities in the United States. For our pilot project, we are focusing on New York City. This is our opportunity to create a use case and gather insights from organizations and individuals who currently serve these communities, such as Uprose, WeAct, LOISADA, and Lower East Side Girls Club.

To execute the pilot project we are raising $60,000 to donate to each organization as a thank you for their input and feedback over three months; to cover my living expenses during the pilot so I can focus on this project full-time; and to compensate a full-stack developer who will inform the post-pilot development phase of the app.

We have a fiscal sponsor, so please let me know directly if you have the ability to donate to this project.

Other projects from the McGuire Consulting Group:

1. The Sustaining Community Fund -- A community-based entrepreneurship model to fund my work and to support artists in Brooklyn (and eventually elsewhere) who are between funded projects and need support to meet their needs so that they can continue to live and work as full-time artists.

2. The Black Art Mom Fund -- Founded in 2021 as a mutual aid initiative to support the most under-resourced group of artists in the United States, Black women caregivers. We are committed to establishing equity in the arts and this fund is our way of providing a piece of that equity.

3. Narrative interventions for Climate, art and philanthropy:

• Climate, Art and Philanthropy lunches -- We gather experts quarterly in climate, art and philanthropy fields to discuss how to collaborate more robustly to support environmental justice communities using art and philanthropy as drivers of change.

• We’re Cooked -- A white paper and ongoing research project to support the infrastructure needed to fortify environemtal jsutice communities using systems thinking/desig, art and philanthropy as drivers of change.

My Bio -- Whitney McGuire, Esq. helps organizations and artists rethink their impact on people and the planet. A lawyer, strategist, educator, and systems designer working at the intersection of culture, climate, and equity, she brings more than a decade of experience transforming how communities and institutions imagine sustainability as a practice of care, justice, and cultural preservation.

As the Founder and Managing Partner of The McGuire Consulting Group, Whitney guides museums, foundations, and mission-driven organizations through change — building strategies that center community, equity, and environmental accountability. Her work has shaped initiatives with The Guggenheim, The Getty, Christie’s, The Kitchen, SUAY Shop, and Custom Collaborative.

Trained as an attorney and informed by her experience as a cultural worker and professor at Parsons School of Design, Whitney bridges legal, ecological, and creative systems to help organizations move from intention to transformation.

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