I founded Ride Free Fearless Money (technically RFFM, LLC) in 2015. I was precarious, underpaid, and determined to change.
Now, in 2023, my bio is fancy: Hadassah Damien is a design strategist and facilitator, economics researcher and finance educator, open source technologist, award-winning LGBTQ artist, and entrepreneur. From participatory budgeting to crypto startups, DIY sliding-scale tours to traditional banking, she’s worked on the ways money can work better for people — and offers strategic approaches to her readers and clients.
Over my life, I have:
- launched freelance, cooperative, and collective businesses,
- learned to 5x my income, going from broke and freaked out to solid and strategic.
- defaulted on student loans I remediated and eventually paid off (on a nonprofit employee income),
- I even saved $15k while making $30k/year as a part-time employed working artist touring the US with queer art
I come from working-class western New York roots. What matters to me is that I put values I inherited and others I built as a community arts organizer and progressive tech builder into my work as a strategist and educator: people’s goals and needs drive the train.
Intersections of privilege and oppression impact our situations and approaches.
Economic justice and racial justice and gender justice go together.
And, if I can’t dance it’s not my revolution (so let’s have some fun while we’re at it).
Hi, I’m Hadassah Damien (she/they):
Ms. Damien has an MA from the CUNY Graduate Center, an Honors BA from the University of Toronto, and had an Accredited Asset Management Specialist designation from the College for Financial Planning.
RFFM LLC is proudly a Certified LGBTBE supplier, as Hadassah’s a queer woman who, yes, rides all things two-wheeled including motorcycles, which inspired the title of this project. After 16 years in Brooklyn NY, she lives and loves in Denver, CO – unceded and ancestral Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Ute land.
Ms. Damien works professionally by day in tech as a senior design strategist, has been a small-business owner as a web developer, has run the financial side of small LGBTQ arts organizations, and has participated in cooperative, freelance, sharing economy, DIY and investment business ventures.
More about Hadassah at: hadassahdamien.com
Contact her via email: hd [at] ridefreefearlessmoney.com
all the details you didn’t know you wanted – below!
RIDE FREE FEARLESS MONEY launched Fall 2015, and has served over 2,000 people in courses, workshops and coaching since!
The mission of Ride Free is to stabilize progressive communities by empowering folks’ relationship to their money, to teach hacks for capitalism, and to help people get their time and energy back!
Ride Free started with recurring classes full of useful financial information, and a “talkshop” series where people who need help handling their financial lives were able to get the information they need to take care of themselves, their communities, and their [often chosen] families in a collaborative, community-building way.
Now expanded to online classes, workshops, and coaching, this information is designed are for people of all kinds and all income levels, with women and LGBTQ people at the center.
Ride Free’s teaching style is practical and action-oriented. Hadassah shares genuinely useful skills, tips, and life hacks in a space that honors the fraught relationships we each may have with money, and the intersectional reasons for that with conversational elements.
“Frankly, I think making handling finances achievable is a way to strengthen, de-stress, and support communities and individuals while de-centering silence, shame, and the concept of financial normativity.
- Women make ~$0.78 on a man’s $1.00, and POC folks make ~$0.58 on a white $1.00 on average in the US. To me, this means it’s crucial that our cents work harder for us and we have info to strategically deal with our money.
- Dyke bars, communal houses, and queer land projects close because they are owned by outsiders who kick out these communities — to me this means owning property is one way to hold the line for community spaces. E.g. The Lesbian Herstory Archives, Idyll Dandy Acres. These spaces need resourced supporters.
- Corporations take tax writeoffs that lose our social safety nets millions, while artists, freelancers, and part-time workers struggle to make ends meet — not realizing there’s tax writeoffs for us, too.
Why this project?
/ability/education — and yet these play into our experiences in important ways….which pretty much never get mentioned in money education.