I have contextualized this initiative within my ancestry and family history and the broader historical context of white settlers in Minnesota in an autoethnography entitled “Scandinavian, Irish, and Minnesotan: A Critical Autoethnography of Family History, Whiteness, and Settler Colonialism” which is archived in an open-access format.

This fund has been made possible by my family, who in 2025 established an irrevocable health care trust for me during a medical crisis. Although the term “trust” is often associated with affluence, this health care trust is limited in size, restricted to medical use, and does not place me in an affluent economic position. It functions as a constrained medical safety net that I am choosing to leverage to enable modest redistribution.

This health care trust represents the primary expected future transfer of family wealth at this time, and I have publicly committed to redistributing a majority of any such transfer. Since wealth redistribution is not the legally mandated purpose of the trust, I can only accomplish this by having it cover my health care expenses and thus freeing an equal amount of my own income up for redistribution. Because of this structure, annual giving will be around 10,000 USD, and this fund will cease operating when the health care trust runs out of funds, if I have a catastrophic health event, or if I die.

Due to the initiative’s limited size and my own administrative constraints, it will not be open to external requests. While I initially considered appointing a community member to help guide funding decisions towards individual fundraisers, I ultimately decided against this approach. Given the large number of existing mutual aid funds and other initiatives already doing critical work (and in the interest of supporting those organized efforts ), I will instead direct the redistributed funds to established initiatives (with or without 501c3 status) who will decide exact uses based on their processes.

The initiative’s two purposes are closely connected. The first purpose is an intentional place-based reparative action related to the land on which my family settled and which the Dakota people were forcibly removed from. The second purpose reflects how systems of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism that my families benefited from and participated in through their assimilation into whiteness as Scandinavian and Irish migrants and settlers continue to impact people of color, especially Black and Indigenous people today, in numerous different ways. In particular, the marginalization of disabled and transgender people of color is deeply related to the ways that settler-colonialism imposed a rigid gender binary and constructed certain bodies as disabled. As a disabled and transgender person who spends most of my time in community with other disabled and transgender people, I feel a responsibility to take action to repair these historical harms and the ways they impact my own community.

I write more about this elsewhere in an autoethnography entitled “Scandinavian, Irish, and Minnesotan: A Critical Autoethnography of Family History, Whiteness, and Settler Colonialism“

Supported initiatives will be documented annually in a spreadsheet on this page and archived at the end of the year in a report (scroll down). I am making this fund public to practice transparency.

All writing, advocacy, and redistribution decisions associated with this redistribution initiative reflect my personal values and judgment. They are made in my personal capacity as an individual and should not be understood as representing the social or political views or positions of any institution, employer, funder, organization, project, or other entities or persons with whom I am affiliated or connected with.

The causes supported so far in 2026 and the corresponding redistribution amounts are reported in this working spreadsheet and will be moved into an archived report at the end of the year.