Finding Ceremony is a reparationist project that needs to be funded by the University of Pennsylvania. Although we plan to pursue grant funding in the meantime, and all labor is being done on a volunteer basis, we do have some ongoing costs for which we need support.
All of the expenses listed below are ones that Finding Ceremony’s Co-Conveners and other members have covered personally. If you are able to support any of these specific costs, or would like to make a more general contribution, please donate below:
Other ways to contribute funds
Venmo: @lyra-monteiro
Zelle: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Paypal: lmonteir@umich.edu
Email for other methods to share funds: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
ONGOING EXPENSES
This list is updated whenever we receive contributions.
Please contribute if you can, and share this page widely.
It’s important that descendant community members and those who are donating their time and labor to support them are not asked to bear the monetary costs of this work.
Learn more about Finding Ceremony’s work in the article Co-Conveners aAliy A. Muhammad and Dr. Lyra D. Monteiro wrote for SAPIENS in May 2023: “Finding Ceremony for Ancestors Held in the Penn Museum and Other Colonial Institutions”
| EXPENSE | Cost |
| Annual Zoom membership for aAliy (to host Black Philadelphians Descendant Community Group meetings, starting March 2025) | $159.90 |
| Annual mail merge software for Finding Ceremony’s new email account (mailing list, starting January 2025) | $36 |
| Lyra’s roundtrip train travel to Philly for archival research, August 2024 | $136 |
| Lyra’s roundtrip train travel to Philly for archival research, September 2024 | $48 |
| Lyra’s local transportation for September 2024 archival research | $8.80 |
| Lyra’s roundtrip train travel to Philly to train new archival researchers, December 2024 | $45 |
| Lyra’s local transportation to train new archival researchers, December 2024 | $10.80 |
| Annual cost of WordPress for http://www.findingceremony.com | $52.26 |
Other ways to contribute funds
***Please indicate in the “memo” or “notes” section which expense your contribution is for***
Venmo: @lyra-monteiro
Zelle: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Paypal: lmonteir@umich.edu
Email for other methods to share funds: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
ABOUT FINDING CEREMONY
Finding Ceremony is a descendant community-controlled reparationist process, restoring the lineages of care, reverence and spiritual memory to the work of caring for our dead. The formation of Finding Ceremony stems from aAliy Muhammad’s and Dr. Lyra Monteiro’s observation and study of the Penn Museum’s negligence stretching back decades, not only with the Morton Cranial Collection, but also with regard to the MOVE remains, and the other estimated 12,000 individuals held in the basement of the museum to this day.
CORE PRINCIPLES
1. The Penn Museum and the University of Pennsylvania have no decision-making role in the process of return of the ancestors–as the perpetrators of the harm, they cannot be part of the healing (other than through funding this work).
2. There are no easy or ideal or even very good solutions to the question of how to return the ancestors in the Morton Collection; and this is because we live in the world that empire has made (with the help of Morton’s racial science)–a world that has intentionally severed the ties to family and homelands of both the living and the dead. While it may be possible to identify direct, lineal descendants for some of the people whose skulls were stolen and trafficked across the world, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to do that for everyone.
3. Given the absence of good solutions, Finding Ceremony proposes that a group of people who are deeply concerned about afterlives of ancestors serve as a stewardship body, who can care for the ancestors who have been held at the Penn Museum, until the best group of people gather to decide what to do with any part of the Morton Collection that they recognize to be their ancestors.
Other ways to contribute funds
Venmo: @lyra-monteiro
Zelle: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Paypal: lmonteir@umich.edu
Email for other methods to share funds: lyra.d.monteiro@gmail.com
Finding Ceremony 