Title sound a little aggressive? This blog is about my journey to making peace with the site Go Fund Me.

I don’t remember when I first heard about it, but it must have when I was snooty and well-heeled because I thought, Why not just fund yourself? Or I think that’s what I thought. This may be another case of memory lapse–a topic I will never blog about, unless I already have and forgot–because GFM was founded in 2010, well into my nuclear family’s period of trading European vacations for more time with an adult at home monitoring teens, though before we were exposed to high-deductible health care plans for engineers.

I remember a colleague in our town’s HS whose daughter was an aspiring singer. He often remarked–plaintively–that if “everyone” in our HS community would give “just” $3 she would be able to fund her next program. True, I agreed, yet everyone else in the community could say the same thing for themselves, why should she be the lucky one?

As a father, he found the answer to this obvious, but the rest of you may see my point.

Eventually I came to see that corporate greed and concomitant income inequality was sinking American workers at a rapid pace, and even though we knowledge workers still felt we controlled our own destinies, I was not unsympathetic to the gaping holes in our safety net that might force others to attempt to fund medical procedures or disaster recovery through friends and strangers.

Now this has hit me personally, as I recently discovered someone close to me who is struggling with financial issues I cannot personally address, and for which I have no tenable solutions to suggest. So I found myself offering to create a GFM for this person, Keira, and she accepted.

I enjoyed the writing part, and my sister, who is more familiar with both GFM in particular and social media in general, gave me lots of guidance and advice. Keira loved what I wrote, and I felt hopeful as I launched the site.

Then the email messages started rolling in–not from potential or actual donors, but from GFM itself. You have to Share the site, they pointed out. You have to Send it to people. The more people who see it, the better.

I was bummed. Solicitation has never been my style. I didn’t even like school fundraisers, at least not when I was on the call-other-parents-and-ask-them side. Today, gunning for money just reminds me of grubbiness of living in a country in which almost everyone seems to be shopping for sales, buying cheap goods of questionable provenance, and trading off basic needs such as food vs medicine, or housing vs education.

Also, I really don’t have much of a social media presence, and I don’t want one. That I am not willing to give up, but I do feel the need to do something more to advance Keira’s cause, so I am sharing the post with you. If you have any sort of forum in which you are willing to display it, so it will have more exposure, that would be the most helpful thing you could do.

In other words, I’m still not soliciting money, or I’m trying not to. The link: https://gofund.me/d5e71f51