1. Excluding walkouts, How do people find time to go to these events?

  2. How do people afford time off work if they are working? Missed wages or time off requests? Vacation pay? Unemployed?

Directly US answers only please. I already know our job system is laughable, and your country gets paid time off and free healthcare.

  • specialseaweed@sh.itjust.works
    4·
    3 hours ago

    There’s an entire galaxy of people doing stuff in their free time to support their community, you just never see them if you aren’t also participating in some sort of voluteerism.

    Virtually every school in America has a PTA or PTO group of parents that volunteer to support the school. When I was on the board of a PTO, everyone else on the board had jobs but they had schedules that weren’t 9-5s. One was a medical biller that had a set amount of work they had to get thru, so they could just adjust their daily schedule to the needs of the school. Another owned a small family run motel and so was able to volunteer in the mornings when the motel had little work to be done. Another was a remote worker for a company in a different time zone so their “9-5” was off hours locally.

    I volunteer at an unhoused shelter now. I get there at 630am with the other volunteers. A bunch of us make breakfast, then catch the bus to downtown for the daily 9-5 (or drive, we live close to downtown). A social worker comes in on her day off on Wednesdays to volunteer as a social worker at the shelter.

    I used to volunteer at a Senior Center. Volunteers were mostly college students who worked in voluteering between classes.

    Youth sports coaches are mostly volunteers after their work day.

    From my experience retirees generally like to support museums, art galleries, and public beautification stuff (picking up trash, planting gardens, etc).

    All of them will make the time to protest. Getting motivated to start volunteering is difficult (it was for me!) but once you start to dedicate time to community building activities, you start to see protesting as just another activity that you believe in and need to make time for. For me, it was just like motivating myself to read more. I’m sitting at the house, I know I should do it, but I didn’t. I forced myself to really look at my time management and realized doomscrolling and general bullshitting was taking up a ton of my day. If I just cut down on the bullshit, I had much more time for reading and volunteering and other stuff.