Ryan's Community Giving Guide

I’m happy to share that the 2026 edition of Ryan’s Community Giving Guide is live!

For the 6th year running, I’ve developed this small zine to highlight nonprofits, community groups and mutual aid efforts in Southeast Michigan that truly need support. Each section focuses on a subset of our shared safety net: housing, food & water, health, youth, mutual aid, literacy, and justice. This guide isn’t comprehensive, as it’s built around my own communities, commitments and values; everything listed inside is something I’ve supported financially, worked with, volunteered for or otherwise personally interacted with in the past few years.

You can download the PDF guide at www.henyard.com/giving

There are a number of new organizations added to the guide this year, which reflects an exciting blossoming of community efforts to address harm at the root. It also reflects a sober understanding that more of our neighbors are in need than ever, and many of our people (and our organizations as well) find themselves targets of retribution and cruelty in 2025.

This Community Giving Guide exists as my annual love letter to my communities and comrades, and is even more special to me because it exists as an example of affirmation and creativity born out of spite.

In 2020, my executive director sent us a large media kit to send to our networks a few weeks ahead of Thanksgiving, and I was (and still am) shocked by the unmitigated greed reflected in that request. We’re talking about the first fall of the COVID-19 pandemic, where countless folks lost family and friends, and our (revenue generating!) unit had just received an additional $5 million dollars in funding from the university. The idea of asking for donations to a group that truly didn’t need it, situated in an institution with a huge endowment? It was a bridge too far.

So I flipped open my laptop and began creating a list of everyone who should be getting donations instead of us — all of the people on the ground doing work to keep people safe in an objectively shitty time, who were on the front lines fighting against water shutoffs and keeping people housed. I wanted it to be more eye-catching than a Google Doc, so I spent some time on graphics and added some of my recent artwork that fit the mood - a mosaic design of Grace Lee Boggs and a quote of hers that framed my approach to solidarity and care. I marked our fundraising message as ‘spam’ in my inbox and sent the first version of this guide to my network instead, and immediately felt a lot better.

I didn’t think much of it until Giving Tuesday (a pseudo-holiday created by the philanthropic set) rolled around, and I saw so many folks on social media, drowning in the awareness of need and suffering illuminated by the events of 2020, were looking to support things but didn’t know where to look. Seeing my guide shared by someone I’d never met as a response to one of those inquiries was a humbling and clarifying shock - and I got to work sharing it out everywhere I could. Some of the orgs listed responded back that they had received donations thanks to the guide, and others were lifted by the recognition of their consistent work and impact.

The lesson I chose to take from this experience was that I shouldn’t universally chide myself for having unkind feelings or spiteful thoughts about tactless behaviors. There’s an alchemy this effort tapped into, a reaction between what folks wanted to offer in material support, my connections and knowledge of our safety net, and an atmosphere filled with grief, greed and possibility. I was able to transmute my spite into creativity and support, and catalyze an effort that simultaneously centered me as a connective node but kept the focus — and importantly, the funding — directly towards the people dedicating deep work to these issues. This process of directly turning my annoyances, dismay and despair into art and community care isn’t exactly new to me, but this project helped refine it — and importantly, helped me make it legible to others.

Please share the guide with your networks, and support the valiant work these folks are doing to hold us all together. We’ll need them both to survive our current traumas and prepare us for a better world in the making. For bonus points, share back with me if you found and donated to a group listed here!

Til next time, may we uplift those doing the hard work of hopefulness in whatever ways we can.