In the past, local activists may have turned to elected officials to raise funds, but now they rely on crowdfunding sites to pay for basics – including school lunches

For years, Annie Hanshew has wanted things to change in her hometown of Helena, Montana – she even ran for the local school board. But her activism came to a head when she found out in April that a collection agency planned to squeeze more than $100,000 from families who hadn’t paid for school meals, Hanshew, 36, felt she had to take strong action, especially after she discovered, to her horror, that school district officials hadn’t been tracking which student debtors actually qualified for either free or reduced lunch: she knew that this move would further burden area low-income families.

In the past, a local activist like Hanshew might have simply called their school board or complained to an elected official and Hanshew and other people did do the latter. But these are dark times, filled with distrust for efficacy of the established order. So Hanshew then reached for the authority many Americans have resorted to as of late when confronted by an emergency or a personal tragedy: GoFundMe.

Her GoFundMe campaign has so far earned $4,545 out of Hanshew’s $100,000 ask.

A press release from GoFundMe in 2017 estimated that its platform raised $33.8m to pay for school room basics

Hanshew chose the platform for a reason: citizens in Seattle and Fargo had already used it to raise money for school lunches in their community. There are also dozens of school lunch-specific campaigns on the site, so that kids with unpaid meal accounts are not “lunch shamed” in places like Richmond, Texas. Indeed, since GoFundMe started in 2010, there have been tens of thousands of campaigns to support K-12 teachers: a press release from the company in 2017 estimated that its platform raised $33.8m to pay for school room basics.

Crowdfunding companies like GoFundMe are in themselves not evil. But the fact that we have to rely on them to pay for our basics is. That schools and their defenders need to raise money for things like lunches is an outrage. People have paid their taxes. Why were these meals not simply provided gratis to kids from struggling families?

Here’s why. Our social fabric is sundered. GoFundMe and the other crowdfunding sites that have proliferated since 2010 are an example of what has sprung up in its place, what I have called America’s dystopian social net. That is, we now require private solutions to what are public problems.

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We needn’t wait for the negative futures promised by sci-fi films such as Mad Max or The Hunger Games, where the wealthy live in luxurious places and the rest of us dwell in a rotting world ruled by an antagonistic government. This bleak future is here now, and exists in tableau after tableau on charity crowdfunding sites.

These campaigns form a frightening archive of America’s failings. There are calls for help relieving healthcare-related debt and shortfalls, victim’s compensation or for gun violence victims. As one campaign put it: “Matt was shot in the chest and had to undergo surgery late last night to remove part of his lung … I know the medical bills will be piling up soon.” Healthcare is another thing, of course, that I believe civilization should pay for and it seems dreadful that each of these pity stories should be pitted against each other, a veritable Fight Club or battle royale of misery. Read together, it’s a catalogue of despair that also can represent the redirection of our social rage to penny-ante altruism.

In particular, the requests for payments for health or IVF treatments are unabashedly plaintive, their authors willing (and perhaps desperate) to expose their illnesses and suffering to whoever will read on. The site also encourages something I think of as “sob story-ism” or, to quote the famous Russian saying, the worse the better. This is not just my lit crit interpretation. The GoFundMe site lays it out pretty clearly, offering campaigners “tips” for writing a “A great campaign Story” (capitals theirs). That story, they say, “will outline your cause clearly, in a way that is engaging to read … all while speaking from the heart”.

In 2017, crowdfunding scholar Daren C Brabham wrote in a paper in the journal New Media & Society (he had previously published online) that there is “no surprise that the same language used to puff up crowdfunding as a democratizing force in the media bears a striking resemblance to the free-market economic arguments used by political groups on the right to justify stripping the NEA and other organizations of public funding”.

Brabham’s case studies were online fundraising for the arts. But his words pertain to school-oriented campaigns as well, as classrooms are also turning into DIY efforts, sticky-taped together, more Etsy than the US Department of Education.

That’s not to say that GoFundMe and the like can’t offer moments of inspiration. Hanshew, after all, is a woman who simply hates to see poor families as well as teachers shell out some of their meager salaries to pay their students’ lunch debt, and knows two teachers who have attempted to do just that, offering to put me in touch with them. (One of them was Melissa Romano, Montana’s teacher of the year.)

If anything, Hanshew’s good citizenship should serve as a model.

To me, though, the need for these efforts is a symptom of a whole generation of parents under siege – overworked and haunted by debt, abandoned by existing structures and unable to pay for anything extra for their kids.

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Even the lucky campaigns tend to point out societal gaps and prejudices, too.

As Hanshew sees it: “In a perfect world, kids would just get meals without means testing. It’s never going to happen in Montana and the fact that we have to fundraise to make up the difference is bad, but I am so used to this reality that I can’t imagine change.”

The Helena public schools ultimately decided, at least partially due to the pushback from the community and the public GoFundMe campaign, to forgive the lunch debt of families that have demonstrated eligibility for free lunches. Of course, that still didn’t cover the children of working-class families whose kids were free lunch ineligible yet struggled to pay for the meals.

Meanwhile, Hanshew has also come to recognize that GoFundMe, while a great outlet for her and others in the community, hasn’t been the most effective tool due to the fees – the crowdfunding site has been taking money off the top of her campaign’s donations and they aren’t tax deductible. For this reason, Hanshew is looking into a new way to cover school lunch debt. It’s – what else – founding, with teacher Romano, her own non-profit.