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.
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.
Organization Website: https://www.redcanarysong.net/
Organization Address: Flushing, NY
Contact Email: csgs@nyu.edu
INTERNSHIP INFORMATION
Dates of Internship: Fall 2024 Semester
Industry: Social Justice
Preferred Academic Level: Undergraduate
Description of Internship:
Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex workers, massage workers, and allies based in Flushing, Queens, seeks an undergraduate student intern for Fall 2024.
Duties include but are not limited to:
- Conducting research on Asian massage raids
- Coordinating the Radical Rest project
- Assisting with other arts-based and worker outreach events alike.
Desired Skills:
- Mandarin or Korean
- Graphic design, film editing, digital exhibition, or exhibition installation experience
- Prior organizing work with criminalized workers.
Other Requirements: This internship is supported by NYU’s Intersectional Feminist/Queer Studies Collective housed at NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
To apply, you must be an NYU undergraduate, and be currently enrolled in a degree-granting program graduating in January 2025 or later. Please submit your CV and a cover letter to csgs@nyu.edu by September 1st, 2024, with “RED CANARY INTERNSHIP” as the subject line.
Your cover letter should answer the following questions:
Why are you interested in working for Red Canary Song? How do you see this internship contributing to, and/or enhancing your academic or professional interests?
Pay, Hours, and Timeframe: $20 per hour, 7 hours per week, Oct 1-Dec 20, 2024.
