Community Statement

Disclaimer: This statement was originally written in January 2025. We have included updates to reflect new information and have indicated such with date stamps.

We are writing this letter as dee fox and aegor ray, co-founders of Sex Workers in Minneapolis (SWIM). We are writing to clearly state our experiences and position on SWOP-Mpls (the Minneapolis chapter of the Sex Workers Outreach Project). We each have five years of direct working experience with this organization, up to and including a conflict process with the Executive Director of SWOP, Andi Snow, in March of 2024. 

In the wake of this nebulous process, we started SWIM in order to continue our advocacy work for sex workers.

We are choosing to make a statement after nearly a year of establishing our new collective. 

We needed time for our own healing and recovery from not only an arduous and dissatisfying conflict process, but from our experiences over many years of power hoarding, differential treatment, lack of financial clarity, punitive standards, and lack of accountability towards the community when complaints and grievances were specifically named. 

At this time, we are speaking out because we have been made aware that the behavior that pushed us out of SWOP, and potentially the sex worker liberation organizing space, is continuing. 

As a grassroots organization borne out of heartbreak, we have taken a lot of time to name and understand our own values. We know that any community experiences interpersonal harm and conflict. However, we believe that as an organization, it is important for us to not dispose of people, partake in bullying, or spread rumors that can lead to social ostracization. 

We also deeply feel that we are accountable to our community – this is a fundamental value. As a result, because of our lengthy experience with SWOP-Mpls, we believe that it is a measure of accountability to be transparent with our community about what we know. 

This statement will address some of the occurrences, events, and patterns of behavior from SWOP-Mpls that we find unacceptable:

1. Lack of financial transparency at the Stripper Awards
2. Punishing or doxing community members
3. Insufficient financial transparency and oversight
4. Disposability 
5. Power hoarding

Written for update 3/7/25:

Unacceptable #1: Lack of financial transparency at the Stripper Awards

We are concerned about the fact that performers in the 2025 Strippers Awards did not get compensated for their work and did not receive the tips thrown on stage. Dancers signed a contract indicating that they were volunteering but the conditions of the contract were inadequately and incompletely shared – some knew that they were volunteering their labor and others didn’t. Audience members didn’t know that the cash they threw on stage wasn’t going to the dancers. 

We question the efficacy and motive for holding an event to celebrate strippers, when strippers are not receiving compensation for their labor or clarity about where the funds are going. 

We also believe that if some dancers were unaware that they were volunteering their labor, and certainly not aware that they were not going to receive tips – that this is an issue with the organization’s communication regarding the event, and not the workers themselves.

Unacceptable #2: Punishing or doxing community members

Recently, one of the three directors of SWOP-Mpls publicly posted the names of ex-members in order to punish the ex-members for their criticisms of the organization. This is inappropriate and unsafe from an organizational standpoint – as a representative of an organization, we have power over individuals and must carry ourselves with responsibility towards people in the sex working community.

• Update 3/7/25: This behavior has happened multiple times, both before and since the March 2025 stripper awards. We believe it is problematic and dangerous for an organization that supports sex workers to make sex workers feel threatened for their critiques – to dox them or to post their critiques publicly on social media platforms related to organizers and organizations. Workers have additionally shared that members of SWOP-Mpls have come to their places of work with what workers reported was an atmosphere of intimidation. We trust and believe worker experience, and want to stress again that this behavior is dangerous and not in line with our organizing values. 

Unacceptable #3: Insufficient financial transparency and oversight

There is a history of a lack of financial transparency in the organization by the Executive Director Andi Snow. At the time that we were kicked out by Snow, we were the only two working members who had taken on public roles (to our knowledge). 

SWOP-Mpls received a $250,000 grant from the Bush Foundation in 2022. Because of the size of this grant, SWOP National urged our chapter to create our own non-exempt status as a nonprofit. 

During our conflict process in the spring of 2024, we asked Andi Snow to establish a functional board in accordance with non-profit law and to hold her as an ED accountable to a charter. She claimed that a board was not required in the state of Minnesota, which is not true. 

Unacceptable #4: Disposability 

In 2022, aegor ray went to rehab before SWOP-Mpls’s annual march, which led to a rupture between him and Andi Snow. aegor’s experience in rehab is named here because ED Andi Snow has reflected on this time as the main reason for aegor being asked to step away from SWOP-Mpls – she asked him to step away and was the sole person to make that decision. In the spring of 2023, aegor was then asked by Andi to write the Decrim Report on contract. He completed this project and continued to organize with SWOP-Mpls on a modest monthly stipend arranged privately between Andi Snow and aegor ray. During the conflict process in 2024, dee fox and aegor ray discovered that aegor was being paid at least 4 times less than dee. It was clear at this point that Snow’s personal feelings about people in the organization dictated how they were financially compensated and valued. 

• Updated 3/7/25 for more context: aegor ray wrote the Decrim Report, a central text for SWOP-Mpls’s decrim campaign based on three listening sessions between members of SWOP-Mpls and aegor. Apart from the introduction of the report, the Decrim Report is aegor’s intellectual and creative labor. He is credited on the back of the report, along with other collaborators at the time (including dee), but is not credited in any of SWOP-Mpls’s current social media presence. aegor was commissioned to write the report, but SWOP-Mpls does not share the report with any attribution to aegor currently, unless privately and directly asked. SWOP-Mpls currently asks for $30 for the Decrim Report. Decriminalization as a movement does not belong to any one person, and the erasure of aegor from the way that SWOP-Mpls currently promotes the Decrim Report reflects a painful practice of extracting the labor of members of our community and erasing it once the labor has led to a monetizable result. 

Disposability Impact & Refusal to Acknowledge Harm 

We can count 12 individuals who, in the last 5 years, have left the organization because of contention rooted with leadership. 

As aegor and dee, we know that we participated in an organizational culture of disposability. At many points, we attempted to pause and understand our role in community and the sustainability of the organization. However, Snow flattened these attempts and maintained absolute power. 

In our conflict process, she stated aloud that she is not accountable to anyone. This much has been made clear over many years.

Unacceptable #5: Power hoarding 

ED Snow creates a culture of power hoarding and interpersonal cruelty and disposability within the organization. 

Throughout our time with SWOP-Mpls, through the variety of grants that the organization has received, we have never seen any clear delineation of how that money has been spent – nor were we ever invited to collectively determine the budget in any meaningful way that had oversight. 

We understood that Andi was the only member with access to purchasing power in the organization. There was no path to raise concerns of how money was spent because she was the only member with the power to make those decisions.

---

We want to name these issues clearly. What we don’t name cannot be dealt with together. We are definitively not asking for any targeted harassment or ostracization. In fact, we are choosing to name these issues in this letter because we have attempted other, private, and community-based ways of addressing harm to no effect. 

Our transparency is not punishment. This movement means everything to us. We are being clear about our experiences and accounts in order to sustain this movement – in a way that doesn’t continue the patterns of relationship that fuel our infighting, exclusion, and isolation. 

We are not asking for SWOP-Mpls to be punished, but we are asking for a few clear and direct measures.

• We ask that the current leadership of SWOP-Mpls take part in a community accountability session with members of the community who have been harmed by their actions and are interested in repair.
• We ask that financial documentation is made transparent, including how harm reduction resources are paid for, and all the salaries of current staff. 
• We ask that SWOP-Mpls no longer charge for the Decrim Report and to only share it with acknowledgement of aegor’s authorship.
• We ask for accountability and repair towards individuals who have been harmed, either through monetary compensation or other means agreed upon privately.
• We ask that Andi Snow steps down as the Executive Director of SWOP-Mpls.