Red Canary Song is a grassroots organization of Asian and Migrant sex workers and massage workers, organizing transnationally. Our work is in the tradition of sex worker mutual aid, and we center base-building with migrant massage workers through a labor rights, migrant justice, and PIC abolitionist framework. We believe that the full decriminalization of sex work is necessary for the safety and survival of massage workers and trafficking survivors. #RightsNotRaids #ResourcesNotRescue
We, ourselves, are not a 501c3 nonprofit as we work against saviorism and the nonprofit industrial complex that often positions themselves as rescuers of Asian and Migrant sex workers, massage workers, and other marginalized groups who engage in informal labor economies. We do not participate in advocacy, social work, or activism as a career. We are a volunteer-based group with a core collective of sex workers, massage workers, and trusted allies who are fiscally sponsored by a 501c3 organization that manages our donations, grants, and taxes, while we get to autonomously make organizing decisions.
Mutual aid, as opposed to charity, does not connote moral superiority of the giver over the receiver. Mutual aid networks can provide goods, services, and funds directly in a decentralized manner. They are dependent on core principles of community, education, and human decency. We use mutual aid as a means of building capacity for ourselves and others in our extended community. We capacity build so that workers like ourselves and beyond ourselves can organize and thrive beyond survival.