My first job out of college was technically a volunteer position.
I graduated during The Great Recession when there were no jobs to be found for half of my graduating class, myself included. After countless rejections, I accepted the first offer that came my way because I literally had zero other prospects.
As an AmeriCorps member, I taught conflict resolution skills to 300 elementary school students across 6 grade levels on 3 different school campuses in 16 different classrooms per week. This is a job that required me to wake up at 5:30am every morning to begin my 90-minute commute via public transportation across town, because I couldn’t afford to live in an area closer to where I worked. This is a job that required me to be on my feet all day, every day, and to be responsive to the needs of 4 -10 year old children. I was required to remember the names of all 300 sensitive students, each of whom I only interacted with for one hour per week. To navigate different school cultures and to remember the nuances of each site and the physical locations of all 16 of the classrooms I taught in. To build relationships with local organizations and fundraise for our program. To supervise a team of college volunteers. To organize events. To brainstorm and implement improvements to our curriculum. To work 10-12 hour days.
And for all of this work, I was paid a whopping $15,000 stipend for the entire year (around $1,000/month after taxes).
During our orientation, we were taught how to apply for SNAP benefits (more commonly known as food stamps) because AmeriCorps members were not expected to be able to afford to put food in our bodies with the money they gave us. Apparently being on food stamps is a noble sacrifice to make when you are college educated and working for “the greater good.” Politicians only deem it a source of shame when you were already poor and need these benefits to truly survive. I realized far too late into my term of service that most of the other AmeriCorps members were either local and lived with family or received some form of financial assistance from their families from afar. I was one of a handful of idiots actually paying rent and a cell phone bill and attempting to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country on this little stipend. I could not budget or spreadsheet my way out of the fact that I simply was not making enough money to get by, let alone thrive.
After my AmeriCorps term was up, I accepted the first job that would take me to Washington, DC, where all cool Black people moved in the early Obama years. I wasn’t particularly excited about the role, but I was going to be making $34,000 a year and would have health insurance and a 401k. I felt rich.
That is, until I got a call from a private student loan provider (that I honestly had forgotten about) letting me know that I had missed five payments in a row and was about to default on my loan. I took my $2,000 life savings and used it to pay off most of my overdue balance. I moved in with my sister and slept on a slowly deflating air mattress behind her couch in the Northern Virginia suburbs until I could save enough money again to get my own place. Apparently I had not yet escaped the world of 90 minute bus-train-bus commutes.
I felt deep shame about my situation. My limited housing options. My other student loan payments that were starting up soon. My need to magically build up a professional wardrobe on a pretty tight budget. Literally not being able to afford to front the cost of office supplies and work lunches and travel arrangements that my job would reimburse me for at the end of the month. Busting my butt for a year with literally nothing tangible to show for it except for an over-drafted checking account. Even as I type this over a dozen years later, rage flows freely through my body at the thought of my family working so hard to send me to one of the top colleges in the nation only for me to end up financially worse off than I started.
Side note: I worked in a freakin *career center* for all four years of college and was never once asked about what kind of lifestyle I hoped to live, what sort of financial obligations I had upon graduation, nor was I educated about the concept of “cost of living,” shown research about what numbers put you in which class status, or provided any financial coaching or insight into starting salary ranges for recent grads.
I did, however, sit through numerous workshops encouraging me to make a difference in the world.💫
Eventually, I did move into my own place and began meeting up with former classmates and new work friends at crappy happy hours around town. I remember one such post-work hang so vividly, during which I sipped on a watered down ginger ale and commiserated with a friend about how real the “real world” felt and how broke we were. As we vented about how expensive LIFE ITSELF in DC was, my peer casually let it slip that she didn’t have any student loans. Although we went to the same college, took the same classes, and were now making the same modest nonprofit salary, only one of us was essentially paying the equivalent of two rents each month. #CancelStudentDebtNOW.
I kid you not, this is my villain origin story. Okay maybe not villain origin story, but this is definitely the moment that I decided that I needed to make more money.
I became obsessed with finding out just how much money there was out there and how much of it I could ethically make. In addition to asking everyone I knew how much money they made, I started combing Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and nonprofit 990s on a daily basis to better understand what salaries corresponded with which positions. I shared my money-making ambitions with a friend of mine, a Harvard grad making six figures in his first job, and he laughed and said “Makkah you will never make money because you care too much about too many things other than making money. I only care about making money, and that’s how I make money.”
I scoffed and doth protested too much, but of course he was right. I was letting misguided notions of purpose and passion prevent me from pursuing career opportunities that would keep my bills on Autopay and my stress levels low. This is what Sarah Jaffe refers to as the “labor of love” myth in her fantastic book Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone. This myth asserts the idea that certain work should be done out of passion and not in pursuit of financial security, which is obviously something only those with access to wealth can afford to do. Jaffe analyzes the history of work and our relationship to it in order to expose how exactly we all (even those of us not from wealthy backgrounds) got tricked into buying into this faulty premise. I literally shouted out “YES!” when I read that “it is not a victory to have work demand our love in addition to our time, our brains, and our bodies.”
Jaffe states that the idea that work should be a source of emotional fulfillment is a relatively recent phenomenon and that every stage of capitalism throughout history has had to morph in pursuit of sufficiently answering three questions:
How will people secure a living for themselves and their families?
How can they find enthusiasm for offering their labor to the process of the accumulation of wealth, even if they are not going to be the ones to ultimately pocket the profits?
How can they justify the system and defend it against accusations of injustice?
The nonprofit sector is especially notorious for pushing the labor of love myth and accusing workers of simply “being in the wrong industry” if they ask for anything close to a livable wage or basic benefits or a dignified workplace or work/life balance. For those of us who have spent our careers in the social sector, we are used to being given 1001 excuses for exploitative business models that seek to do one thing and one thing only: squeeze as much work out of us for as little money as humanly possible. These environments aim to erase the boundaries between the personal and the professional until our entire lives are centered around work and the endless pursuit of the idea of rest, even if rest is never actually achieved.
Nonprofit missions are often absurdly unattainable like “ending poverty” meaning that we can remain on the hamster wheel in pursuit of this goal literally forever, with very little progress ever actually being made. This enables the organization to justify working us even harder for longer and with less to achieve better and faster results.
In recent years, these environments have particularly capitalized on the emotional commitment low income workers and workers of color have to their home communities that they now seek to serve. The “representation matters” crowd has become obsessed with putting us in environments that were never built for us and, in fact, cause us great harm psychologically and financially. In many conversations with young people from these backgrounds, I have been struck by how the concept of selling out keeps a significant number of these folks in “passion jobs” that will never compensate them enough to make up for the tokenization and exploitation they experience, to narrow the racial wealth gap, to raise themselves or their families out of poverty, or to even just stop living paycheck to paycheck.
But making enough money to provide a decent life for ourselves and our families is especially important in the face of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “organized abandonment,” or a state strategy of racial capitalism designed to continuously exploit vulnerable communities for profit while callously neglecting to provide the conditions necessary to support and sustain life itself. If the pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that our leaders are perfectly fine putting our lives on the line for the sake of the economy and that predominantly poor, Black, and/or Native lives are sacrifices our nation is always gladly willing to make to keep the GrubHubs grubbing.
In America, we do not have a safety net. If you do not have enough money to afford life-saving treatment, you will die. If you do not have enough money to afford a stable place to live, you will be homeless. If you do not have enough money put aside to support yourself in old age or through injury or disability, you will likely die and die homeless. Rent and home prices have increased. The cost of food has increased. The cost of gas has increased. The cost of education has increased. The cost of healthcare has increased. My fellow Muslims - the cost of HAJJ has increased. The only thing that has not increased at the same rate as all of these other things is the cost of our labor. We are being paid less to do more. The foundation of the US economy is and has always been human suffering.
So what do we do about all of this? Knowing these facts, how have I created my own strategy of personal and community care in the face of organized abandonment by the state?
I accepted that two things can be true at once. Systemic problems can’t be solved entirely through individual solutions AND I need to do whatever is within my own power to protect myself from the cruel impacts of state organized abandonment. Lowkey, for Black people making enough money to live and live well is a racial justice issue. I like to imagine both my ancestors and my descendants at rest. That image in itself has been motivating enough for me to opt out of self-exploitation whenever I can, and pursue a path of financial stability.
I had to reset my relationship with money. I had to stop thinking of money as something scary that there is never enough of, and start thinking of it as something that I actually need a lot of to live the life that I want and to give the people I care about the lives they deserve. You need money to do pretty much everything. A friend sent me this article several years ago and it was the slap in the face that I needed to understand that the “modest but happy life” I had imagined for myself (debt-free, with a vacation every year or two, a healthy family, and maybe even a house and a car) would literally require a ton of money. Money was a means to an end. And that “end” was peace of mind and being able to operate from a place of abundance, rather than through the struggle of perpetual scarcity. I wanted money so that I could pour from an empty cup and stop splitting droplets and pretending like everyone’s thirst could actually be quenched from such meager offerings.
I reoriented my relationship to work, and became clear about what I absolutely needed from a workplace. I decided that the bare minimum that I need in a job is a role that is intellectually stimulating and enables me to do some basic problem solving and process improvement; that does more good than harm in the world; that I can clock in and out of and not really have to think all that much about when I’m off the clock; that does not drain me emotionally or spiritually and on most days I feel either neutral or positive about the environment itself; that enables me to both contribute my existing skills and helps me grow new ones; and that pays me what I need (in both salary and benefits) to live comfortably. I am a person who is process oriented and not substance oriented, so the topic of my work and the industry that I work in doesn’t matter as much as to me as the specific role that I will have. My job is not my identity and my work should ultimately serve to improve my quality of life, not to absorb my life. As Toni Morrison so wisely warned us “you are not the work you do, you are the person you are.”
I figured out how much money I *wanted* to make to be thriving and not just surviving. I calculated the salary that I hoped to make by tallying up the monthly costs of things that I wanted to be able to comfortably afford based on that stage in my life. In my current season that list looks like: a mortgage, groceries, childcare, travel, gas, eating out, home decor and furnishings, retirement savings, gifts, charitable contributions, and the ability to make emergency contributions to support friends and family members through unexpected circumstances. How much money would I need to make to be able to do these things, save a little, and NOT overdraft my account?The first time I did this exercise, the number I came to was $80,000. So I became laser focused on finding a job where I could make at least that. If you’ve never made that kind of money before it can feel surreal to say the number out loud. But knowing how much you need is the first step you must take in order to get it.
I did a ton of research and identified higher paying roles that were within my reach. My biggest salary jumps have always come from switching jobs and, before accepting a new role, I always negotiate my starting salary. How do I find these jobs, you might ask? Well, my favorite thing to do is browse job listings when I am not actively looking for a job. Some people spend hours on their phones scrolling Instagram, I spend hours scrolling job descriptions. When I see things that interest me and have a salary that I want to make, I take a screenshot and pay attention to the stated requirements for the role. I then focus on talking to people in that industry to get their perspective on what the work is like and what minimum qualifications I need to get in the door, and then I find ways to attain those qualifications in my current role. When I feel like I finally have enough transferrable experience to tailor my resume to the job that I want, I submit my application and hope for the best.
A few caveats: Knowing how much money you *need* to live the life that you *want* is also important to help you avoid the pitfalls of never ending capitalistic pursuit. You can always be making more, getting more, buying more but that is not the exercise here. If you focus on always wanting more then you are setting yourself up for a lifetime of chronic dissatisfaction. The question you should be asking yourself isn’t “how much more can I make?” It is “how much is enough for me?” and you are the only person that can answer that question for yourself. I have been relatively content for years at jobs where others (who took pay cuts, who were preoccupied with the fact that they could be making more, who took the role to primarily pursue a passion and gave far too much of themselves to the job) were absolutely miserable and burned out shortly after arrival. Don’t be that guy. Figure out what the right balance is between what you’d like to give of yourself and what you’d like to receive in return and find satisfaction in the moments where that sweet balance is achieved.
In addition to making money, I also sought to define and embody a work ethic and leadership presence for myself that was not predicated on exploitation and perpetuating harm. I have a strong unshakable belief that how you make an impact in this world (and how you treat the people responsible for helping you get there) matters just as much as the impact itself. So if your organization is successful because you exploit your workers, then your organization is not successful. Success must be earned through doing right by others along the way, as well as through the end result that the hard work yields.
I also believe that saviorism is a white supremacist norm that has worked its way throughout the social sector to justify worker self sacrifice in the name of some amorphous “greater good.” But it’s much more powerful to not see yourself as a savior, but as part of and in deep kinship with the communities you serve. If you believe that your people deserve to rest and fair working conditions, then you must also rest and have fair working conditions. If you are unable to free yourself from toxic cycles of exploitation, then you are probably not the right person to lead others to freedom.
Finally, on the note of freedom: once you “make it” please do not forget where you came from. Please don’t let your financial comfort make you forget what it’s like to be a junior staff member or living paycheck to paycheck. Please don’t forget that you have a moral responsibility to interrupt harm and make life better for other people, even if you have no good role models of how to do that around you. Another favorite Toni Morrison quote of mine is this: “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”
Our people have survived by caring deeply for ourselves and each other, even in the face of seemingly insurmountable state sanctioned neglect. Never underestimate the power of community care and what is possible when pooled resources combine with love and immense creativity to carve new ways forward for us to live, dream, and be.
I didn’t arrive to the place I am now on my own. There are a few resources and programs that were deeply impactful to me as I sought to figure all this money and job and capitalism stuff out for myself. In addition to all that I have linked above, here are a few more resources for you to check out if they might be helpful:
Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance
How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Now go forth and prosper.
Such a great read Makkah. Thank you for sharing. As a former AmeriCorps alum this hit me deep, and yes #CancelStudentDebtNOW ! So many of us are healing and shifting our relationship with how we are spending our time and how we make money. I'm grateful for the resources you shared. May wealth flow to you in abundance so that you may live comfortably, give generously, and continue to empower others.