Why I Don’t Charge Clients of Color And How It’s Not Charity

Can a billing policy reflect reparations? Why this spiritual director never bills Clients of Color.

My Rate Is $100/Hour for White Clients

If you’re White, you pay my rate. That’s the fair cost of my labor.

I don’t charge clients of color. I don’t reduce the fee, and I don’t offer a sliding scale. I simply don’t bill you. This isn’t because I assume anything about your income. I meet with Black clients who earn more than I do. This billing policy isn’t about anyone’s personal finances, but it is about our structural and economic context.

More on Our Structural and Economic Context

In the U.S., access to wealth, land, education, and credit has always been racialized. Our institutions have been built on extraction from Black, Indigenous, and other Communities of Color. These systems haven’t disappeared in the present but they have evolved and so they may look different now.

If you look at the racial wealth gap today, things like the patterns of ownership and debt, and which neighborhoods get funded by city council decisions, and which schools get more resources, you’ll see that the same structures are still operating today.

Note: If you don’t realize this, we’re probably not a good fit to work together anyway.

My Decision to Acknowledge the Inequalities

So no, I don’t charge Clients of Color. It’s not because you can’t pay. If you can pay, I love that for you but we’re not doing that here. In a society where White wealth continues to grow through the extraction of time, land, labor, and life from minoritized others, I refuse to let my small business echo the pattern.

We Can Do This Together

If I can provide meaningful, individual spiritual direction to a Person of Color, and we’re a good fit, then let’s do that. There is no transaction or indebtedness. I’m not doing you a favor.

Some Clients of Color choose to donate the value of the session (which is currently $100) to a grassroots cause or neighborhood project they care about. I love that too, especially if it supports a Black-owned business or builds local wealth.

But that’s entirely your decision and I do stay out of it. To be clear: This isn’t a trade and no donation is expected. I’m simply trying to remove one barrier in the one small corner of the economy that I can affect, which is on the fees for the service that I can provide.

On Making This Public

I wasn’t sure about posting this publicly. I usually do this individually, one-on-one. But I’ve decided to share it because business models do send signals whether we talk about them or not.

And silence is never neutral, and money always tells a story anyway. The story in my ledger includes charging a fair rate for my time with White clients, and charging nothing for Clients of Color.

The work of spiritual direction here at Spill the Tea means a lot to me. I want this space to be different in all the ways that I can make it be so. This is one choice I make as the founder of a small business, and it’s one way I think about how to live out my personal values, putting them into action so that other people can have more access too.

“We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change.” – Mahatma Gandhi

“The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.” – Maya Angelou