Help us take parental leave!

Hi there! I’m Beni, and my wife Em and I are about to be first time parents! We are a queer couple in Portland, Oregon, who have long wanted to start a family of our own. We are both self employed tattoo artists which inherently makes acquiring paid family leave extremely difficult. This year, Oregon put a new plan into effect that gives people like us an opportunity to get paid leave for 12 weeks, but the program only became available to pay out benefits starting Sept 3rd. After filling out all of our information, we appear to only qualify for about $60 per week, which simply isn’t enough to give either of us time off to spend with our new baby- we would both need to go back to work immediately. We are appealing this decision and doing everything in our power to change this number to something closer to what the program promised based on income, however our new understanding is that even with appealing this decision we are unlikely to get much more especially as the program has only just started and we haven’t even been able to pay in for a full year.

This is hard - neither of us like asking for help in general, and asking our friends, family, and strangers to help us is uncomfortable. But now is a time where we need help. We both imagined that we would qualify to receive more than this, and after paying into the program and signing up in January we were definitely banking on it being what would keep us afloat apart from our very meager savings. Beni is already planning on going back to work in October but Em was desperately hoping for the promised 12-14 week leave to recover and have time at home with baby.

Money we receive through this go fund me will allow us to spend those precious first few weeks with our little one, who is due on September 23rd! We have already acquired most of the newborn related materials we need, so these donations will simply provide us with food and help cover bills, allowing us to have the all important time with our baby and each other as we establish our new routines as a family of 3. We are truly grateful for any and all help we receive.

Em is such a hard worker, she will be working until a week before her due date, and has been carrying our family on her back for years. It has been a rough and painful pregnancy for her and it would be so hard to see her not be able to have some time off. She needs this time desperately and the thought of not getting this break has been truly devastating for us both.