Help Cat Recover: Unpaid Construction Work & Stolen Tools

Howdy y'all-

I'm writing this on behalf of a very dear friend of mine. Cat and I have been friends for almost a decade, and during that time we've worked on a number of projects together. Time after time I've witnessed her deep dedication to supporting her people. Cat throws down hard for community projects, grassroots mutual aid, and friends in a pinch. She's helped me get on my feet multiple times over the years.

Now, its time for me, for us, to return the favor.

Pitching in will help Cat get back on her feet after losing almost 2 months of wages, having her car break down, and losing her tools for work.

Any one of those things is enough to derail someone's life. Experiencing all of those things at once has completely wiped out our friend's resources for survival. Please donate or share with your circles so that our friend can recover financially.

Thank you and take care,

-Riley Pansy

a message from Cat:

Hi y’all. I'm notoriously bad at asking for help! Were it not for Riley and the amazing folks at the Pansy Collective offering support, I have no idea how I'd be managing. I certainly wouldn't be here putting myself in a position to accept support online ('cause I'm old and stubborn).

You may know me from many different places, holding many different jobs. I'm currently in Pittsburgh, but after discovering my father's previously undiagnosed Alzheimers' last year I ended up spending six months up in Canada trying to support him all while not being legally allowed to work there. This put me in mega debt and since January of this year I've been grinding doing residential construction and renovation work to try to break even and recover.

I'm trying to raise money for about 2 months worth of unpaid wages after throwing down hard since March to bottom-line a big emergency community construction project to keep a community member from getting foreclosed. Unfortunately, once things stabilized in early april, that community member offered me real money & asked me to stay on and really get the job done professionally.

I successfully removed 80 years of water damage from 1/3 of their front porch roof, rebuilt it to code, and re-roofing almost half of the patio. This in addition to a dozen other significant repairs throughout the inside and outside of their house.

And yet, one delayed payday turned into 3 delayed paydays, which turned into the homeowner refusing to pay altogether and cutting off contact, but not before a whole bunch of work tools happened "walked off the job" at their house, and the critical car repairs that I'd been putting off while waiting to be paid eventually put my car completely out of commission.

All of my legal means of recourse involve suing them or calling the building department; both of which, ironically, would very likely jeopardize their (and their family members') housing - the very thing I got sucked into this mess to help avoid.

At this point, I need to catch up on 3 months of debt payments, get my car working again, replace the tools that went missing at their house, and get enough money to cover basic expenses, repay the small personal loans I took out to float while I was waiting for the homeowner to pay–just so I can get back to work and keep crawling out of debt the rest of this year. Which is exactly what I intend to do.

I'm really grateful for you taking the time to visit this page and read through my story. Sometimes when you get screwed over, it's hard to feel like you deserve anything to go right. But we are all we have, and we all deserve to have enough to get by on. At the very least.

Thanks again. I'm not crying, you're crying.