Help Us Move!
Donation protected
Hi, I’m Kivan Bay. If you’re seeing this and don’t know why, someone who cares about me, my husband David, or our dear friend Norah has shared this fundraiser.
David and I currently live in a small rural town, which has been okay because it means I’ve been able to support us on our very small freelancer budget, but there have also been some problems. There is a lot of scary rightwing stuff in our town. Visibly, there’s been a pronounced increase in white supremacist graffiti around our neighborhood. We are both bisexual men, he is cis and I am trans and we don’t feel particularly safe with local law enforcement. We also have some problems in our current apartment that I will share more details about later. But, we have a plan and we are very hopeful! My husband has been finishing some job training that will allow him to find better employment. We would like to move to a place where we can get to a position where we aren’t two seconds away from a financial emergency all the time, and are a little bit safer in our town and our home. Portland offers many of these things for us!
In Portland:
David will be able to get a decently paying office job with insurance coverage. This is very important for us! He has a chronic pain issue which precludes a lot of the physical labor jobs available here and necessitates health coverage, and since I came out as trans I also have some new medical expenses. Being in a place where David can work in a way that is safe for him physically would go a long way to helping us out.
I will be able to find a day job on top of my freelancing to help with my transition. As I am now out as trans, I am soon to be seeking top surgery. I would like to be in a place where I can hopefully find more work as an out trans man taking hormones, which will allow me to save up for my top surgery and the hope is not have to crowdfund it. Also, the place in my state where I will 99% likely be having top surgery? In Portland. Moving to Portland allows me to save up for my top surgery AND saves me the cost of traveling up to Portland for surgery. Further, I need to get this signed off by two therapists in order to achieve it. This will be much easier to find in Portland, where local trans groups can help me navigate the entire process. There just isn’t much of that in the small town we live in.
David and I will have more community. The place we are in has a conservative lean to it, and we are both very not conservative. As HRT makes people read me more as a man, we would like to be in a city that has more of a queer community for us to be a part of. We both have friends in Portland, and I would have more career connections for my freelancing as well!
Speaking of freelancing, a lot of the work I do is based around a sociological field of study called Fat Studies. In Portland, I will be able to do more with this, including creating book groups and helping to organize book sharing on these topics.
Our current roommate situation, without going into too much grisly detail (tw for mention of sexual assault, tw for gun) , is untenable for us. We would be much happier living with our friend Norah, who stayed with us for about two months a while ago. We feel confident that we can live long-term together after this experience and that it would be a good home for us.
We feel that Portland offers us a better opportunity to become financially stable in the long run, pay off our debts, reach our respective goals re: careers, transition, and community, and be much happier and productive. Your help in reaching there would mean so much to us, our cats, and our future.
We expect we will be paying between $1500 and $2000 a month in rent for a two bedroom that the three of us can live in. We expect the security deposit to be 100% of the potential rent. We expect a cost of at least $150 for gas for the people willing to help us move our bed. We have two cats who are very important to us and cannot be separated from each other. We expect a pet deposit between $600 and $1000 dollars. We expect my husband will have work in Portland within the next eight weeks, but expect him to need $200 for interview clothes, $100 for trips up to Portland, and about $100 for a job certification test he must take, but we got a lot of that covered already! Many of the places we are looking at require us to get renters insurance before we can move in, which with our cats will likely be about $50. So, making allowances for costs I cannot predict entirely, what we assume the breakdown of our costs will be is:
$2000 rent
$2000 deposit
$1000 pet deposit
$400 gas for moving, various interview expenses, renters insurance
$200 food for us to eat, food for our cats, litter for our cats until David gets a job
$400 a cushion to make sure that all our utilities can be hooked up when we move in, some of them require deposits sometimes
These are rough estimates and come to $6000 USD. Norah has some money put aside already, but David and I would still like to raise $6000 for this move in case it takes her some time to land a job, or us to land an apartment, and she ends up needing those funds to survive in the interim. If we find a good deal on an apartment and end up having to pay less for rent/deposit, we will either lower the fundraising goal or, if the fundraiser has already been fulfilled (?!!?!?!?? which what) use anything extra we have to keep ourselves afloat (we will have a good mattress and a small bookshelf and our computers to start so like… a card table???) as we start our new lives in Portland.
Thank you so much for your help in this. When we are financially stable, we would like to pay this forward by helping to support other people in need.
David and I currently live in a small rural town, which has been okay because it means I’ve been able to support us on our very small freelancer budget, but there have also been some problems. There is a lot of scary rightwing stuff in our town. Visibly, there’s been a pronounced increase in white supremacist graffiti around our neighborhood. We are both bisexual men, he is cis and I am trans and we don’t feel particularly safe with local law enforcement. We also have some problems in our current apartment that I will share more details about later. But, we have a plan and we are very hopeful! My husband has been finishing some job training that will allow him to find better employment. We would like to move to a place where we can get to a position where we aren’t two seconds away from a financial emergency all the time, and are a little bit safer in our town and our home. Portland offers many of these things for us!
In Portland:
David will be able to get a decently paying office job with insurance coverage. This is very important for us! He has a chronic pain issue which precludes a lot of the physical labor jobs available here and necessitates health coverage, and since I came out as trans I also have some new medical expenses. Being in a place where David can work in a way that is safe for him physically would go a long way to helping us out.
I will be able to find a day job on top of my freelancing to help with my transition. As I am now out as trans, I am soon to be seeking top surgery. I would like to be in a place where I can hopefully find more work as an out trans man taking hormones, which will allow me to save up for my top surgery and the hope is not have to crowdfund it. Also, the place in my state where I will 99% likely be having top surgery? In Portland. Moving to Portland allows me to save up for my top surgery AND saves me the cost of traveling up to Portland for surgery. Further, I need to get this signed off by two therapists in order to achieve it. This will be much easier to find in Portland, where local trans groups can help me navigate the entire process. There just isn’t much of that in the small town we live in.
David and I will have more community. The place we are in has a conservative lean to it, and we are both very not conservative. As HRT makes people read me more as a man, we would like to be in a city that has more of a queer community for us to be a part of. We both have friends in Portland, and I would have more career connections for my freelancing as well!
Speaking of freelancing, a lot of the work I do is based around a sociological field of study called Fat Studies. In Portland, I will be able to do more with this, including creating book groups and helping to organize book sharing on these topics.
Our current roommate situation, without going into too much grisly detail (tw for mention of sexual assault, tw for gun) , is untenable for us. We would be much happier living with our friend Norah, who stayed with us for about two months a while ago. We feel confident that we can live long-term together after this experience and that it would be a good home for us.
We feel that Portland offers us a better opportunity to become financially stable in the long run, pay off our debts, reach our respective goals re: careers, transition, and community, and be much happier and productive. Your help in reaching there would mean so much to us, our cats, and our future.
We expect we will be paying between $1500 and $2000 a month in rent for a two bedroom that the three of us can live in. We expect the security deposit to be 100% of the potential rent. We expect a cost of at least $150 for gas for the people willing to help us move our bed. We have two cats who are very important to us and cannot be separated from each other. We expect a pet deposit between $600 and $1000 dollars. We expect my husband will have work in Portland within the next eight weeks, but expect him to need $200 for interview clothes, $100 for trips up to Portland, and about $100 for a job certification test he must take, but we got a lot of that covered already! Many of the places we are looking at require us to get renters insurance before we can move in, which with our cats will likely be about $50. So, making allowances for costs I cannot predict entirely, what we assume the breakdown of our costs will be is:
$2000 rent
$2000 deposit
$1000 pet deposit
$400 gas for moving, various interview expenses, renters insurance
$200 food for us to eat, food for our cats, litter for our cats until David gets a job
$400 a cushion to make sure that all our utilities can be hooked up when we move in, some of them require deposits sometimes
These are rough estimates and come to $6000 USD. Norah has some money put aside already, but David and I would still like to raise $6000 for this move in case it takes her some time to land a job, or us to land an apartment, and she ends up needing those funds to survive in the interim. If we find a good deal on an apartment and end up having to pay less for rent/deposit, we will either lower the fundraising goal or, if the fundraiser has already been fulfilled (?!!?!?!?? which what) use anything extra we have to keep ourselves afloat (we will have a good mattress and a small bookshelf and our computers to start so like… a card table???) as we start our new lives in Portland.
Thank you so much for your help in this. When we are financially stable, we would like to pay this forward by helping to support other people in need.
Organizer
Kiva Bay
Organizer
Phoenix, OR