Tora

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Thank you all for being here.

Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming to our GoFundMe. Our names are Alyssa, and Sabrina. We are a queer couple, who need immediate financial aid so that we do not become evicted, and thus threaten our lives into homelessness. We are artists that run our own merchandise businesses, and with the launch of the tariffs and the economic impacts within the United States of America, our businesses completely collapsed in May 2025. We have fought ceaselessly all of last year to try and adapt and bounce back, but all of our efforts have completely failed... We began to fall behind on rent last November, and was keeping up just enough to get us this far. However, as of last month in February, all of our resources depleted, and we are sinking very fast.

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What happened.

We are one of many people who are grossly effected with the current conditions of the United States. We are being targeted negatively by our country for being queer, losing Human Rights, and the rise of false information to dehumanize us for being transgender, yet, that isn't even what put us in this situation at all! We have been surviving So Much that we can't even stress about our freedoms being threatened. Our lives were completely destroyed over night do to Trump's decisions impacting the economy and thus our businesses, particularly with the start of the Tariffs. It has been downhill since.

These are our pools of income as with its history to illustrate the fall of our livelihoods.

The drop across all platforms is daunting.

After 10 years of making art our profession as independents, we understand how to be flexible and adaptable with ever changing business strategies, economic climates, trends, outreach, marketability etc. Having one pool of income falling through, is something we've experienced and have always managed to adapt too. Usually that is at the fault of the platform, or covid taking in-person conventions away. However, with every source of income both online and in-person, being not just down, but totally slashed to the degree that is being shown, it is clearly evident that these are impacts of the overarching economy that have no hint of leaving any time soon. It's especially evident, because we travel all over the country visiting many States to sell at conventions, and it is every single State, that is 60%-90% down on profits.

With inflation, and a corporate/capitalist rise in Art/Pop Culture Conventions, table costs to these events are becoming so expensive that we have lost the majority of our tour schedule. Last year we barley survived because we had 10 conventions, while this year for 2026, we were only able to keep 3... We cannot afford to renew tables that now cost $500-$1500+, when we made $1200 gross income at that convention. We cannot afford to fly to conventions because of the cost of flights are so high. Product both domestic because of inflation, and international outsourcing because of the trade war, have become so expensive that we cannot afford restock. Nor can we afford a sustainable quantity of inventory for new product to secure future income. Raising prices for our product to compensate for inflation, only brings lesser sales as well...

Alyssa has applied to 78 jobs, and Sabrina has applied to just as many, and yet we CANNOT find even an entry level position!... So many weeks and hours looking for such a solution, has thus far only proven to be a complete waste of time. Now with the debt so out of hand, getting a job well over minimum wage wouldn't even be enough to save us if one of us were hired a month ago! Doordashing where we live to find an immediate source of income, cannot keep us afloat either for the time it takes to make as little as $80 at peak times of the day. Alyssa tried opening commissions, but not only is it not sustainable, but her mental health has been so shot under all this stress, that Alyssa cannot accept anymore commissions. We jumped on doing our taxes Feb, and gave our tax information to our specialist March 5th, but we still have yet to receive our tax returns to apply for any kind of governmental assistance for financial aid or economic relief. Clearly, we cannot wait for either our tax specialist to finish our returns, nor the time of the application period on the State of Oregon to give us anything if we get approved.

Living like this with having no idea when/if it would end, we drained our savings, and maxed all our credit cards, hoping we'd bounce back to recovery! but things have only gotten worse, and after a year of fighting, we now have nothing left...

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What we need, and what to do.

Since May 2025, we believed perhaps this would be a rough patch that would turn around in a few months with some extra effort to adapt, so we did our best to try and fight for our 4 year rental lease. However, this has proven to become just our foreseeable future, and we cannot stay in our current rental. It is eating us alive. Every day has been a race against the clock anticipating next month's rent of $2700, and that is a ton of money when you aren't making nearly anything at all.

We moved into a TownHome March 2025 with the income we had prior to May 2025. We had the faith of a successful business that has proven stable and dependable for the last 10 years, even through the Covid Shutdown in 2020. Then just two months after moving into a place that was below our means, our rental suddenly became scarily WAY above our means. Everything we had worked so hard to achieve, was taken away instantly, immediately putting us in survival mode practically over night. We cannot stay in this rental. We must pay our debt, break the lease, and get out before our rental history is destroyed with an eviction. It is unsustainable, and with two months behind on rent, and a third around the corner, we can't make money to recover to pay that debt, ontop of breaking the lease, ourselves. This isn't even the money we technically need in addition, to find a new place to live after... We are in serious need of big help.

As is so common to the queer experience, Alyssa does not have any family to reach out too for help, aside from one charished member, her younger Sister with her inner family of 4 kids. Sabrina has some family, but they too are horribly effected by the economic state of our country and is barley surviving with little to give. Our chosen family with our friends and partners are in a similar position. We humbly approach anyone here willing to throw anything to help save us from homelessness, or spread the word on any platform or via word of mouth, to restart our lives in a small apartment that we can live in under these circumstances. We truly have nowhere else to turn, this GoFundMe is our last resort...