Growing is breathing new life into bodies that change, structurally. It can mean getting bigger. Or it can mean getting more complex, in the way that learning fosters connections among the synapses in our brains. It can also just mean maturing. Through The May 13 Group, workers from displaced and dispossessed groups who produce knowledge for the people that they come from and are accountable to—credentialed or not, paid or unpaid, as consultants or staff, across firms, foundations, governments, organizations, higher education, and publishers—can grow their livelihood and lines of income to ensure their families’ and communities’ survival without orienting themselves around capital.

Become part of a growing solidarity economy whose constituents will collaborate; trade goods and services with one another; share access to a commons of resources; and engage in mutual aid, cooperative economics, collective bargaining, and direct action organizing by making a contribution between $75 and $2,999. The May 13 Group prioritizes Grow contributions, which will comprise half our overall budget and most of our members, to ensure that our solidarity economy remains led by and useful for members of the working class and the struggle against capitalism.

Planting involves loving. It’s about protecting seeds that have survived—preserved and passed down—for generations deep in the nourishing soil of mother earth or layers of our bodies. Members of the petit-bourgeois professional and managerial class within the nonprofit/ nongovernmental industrial complex, who often grapple with conflicting loyalties and interests—including those arising from their own precarity—can co-create healing time, space, and community through The May 13 Group.

Fund healing and community-building activities that support members in (re)connecting with their ancestral, community, and experiential knowledge to counter hegemonic narratives by making a contribution between $3,000 and $6,999. The May 13 Group will bracket Plant contributions at a quarter of our overall budget. Accepting such contributions allows us to expose and undermine the theoretical justification and cultural reinforcement of capitalist relations through these activities. Limiting them helps us resist the pressure to admire the problem without changing material relations, focusing on style at the expense of substance.

In an ecosystem, composting means that things die and decay. Organisms break down their matter, transforming it into energy. This generates heat and nourishes new life. Members of the owning/ ruling class seeking to deconstruct and transform the exploitative and extractive ideas about risk, knowledge, and investment that allowed them to accumulate wealth can cede their capital to seed The May 13 Group’s work toward epistemic healing and wholeness.

Change the current knowledge economy’s paradigm, narrative, or mental model with The May 13 Group by making a contribution of $7,000 or more and repudiating control or ownership of its process or results. The May 13 Group will cap Compost contributions at 25% of our overall budget, to ensure that we do not disproportionately depend on, and orient ourselves toward, a few contributors who can give large amounts or the capital class more generally.

Note that some toxins will not compost in our lifetimes, if ever. We refuse contributions of any size from individuals and institutions who profit—financially, politically, or socially—from the ongoing manufacture of weapons, extraction or pollution of nature, exploitation of people and other animals, or oppression and abuse, including genocide, of minoritized and peripheralized groups.