Fundraising Progress
The great news is that we’re bringing in some cash! This is so super cool. It’s helping us truly anchor this work; to water the seeds put in place to grow this nonprofit into a thing that catalyzes a movement.
We’ve had donors from $5 to $500 since January 1. We've brought in $2,048 of our $10,000 goal for early 2023. Funds are being donated through Substack here ($509); our website ($335); ActBlue ($1065); and Patreon ($139).
It's inspiring, and it’s helping us literally hold space for growing this work. We’ve got incredible gratitude. We’ve been able to cover some of our technical bills, and to partly pay what would ideally be a full-time person to get this nonprofit going properly. Here’s a page with more on what funding does.
It’s a start. It’s planting seeds.
The rougher news is that it’s not enough to fund a full-time person to grow this shift, and definitely not enough yet to run ads to help us bring in volunteers and to drive activity. We’re approved to advertise on Facebook, so we’ll run ads once we cover the tech expenses and a base living expense for a full-time person to run this. We’ll fundraise later this spring to help us start up a podcast, too.
This is what a very brand-new nonprofit looks like. You start it as a seed. Hopefully we grow it into fields and forests and wildflowers all over the place. We can.
Right now, our priority is keeping the lights on, getting online Zoom events going, getting folks to participate in those events, and building up a core group of active folks and activity. Volunteer here if interested in getting in on the early stuff we’re starting. We’ll activate that volunteer list here shortly.
On that subject…. we’re having a tough time getting folks to Zoom events as we’re limited to promoting those events through this Substack list and the randomness of social media algorithms on Post, Facebook, and LinkedIn. With that said, we’re likely moving this week’s scheduled event to next week to give time to recruit more people to participate. Once the rescheduling is done, we’ll reach out here and ask you all to help us get more people involved — including yourselves.
There’s a lot of fancy writing here on Substack about the chaos up in this country.
What we need is more than writing. We need more than reading. We need more than memes and shared anger and shared solidarity.
We need persuasion and influence and storytelling and better media attention. We need to expand our permeation and reach — all of us; the coalition of the majority. It’s not going to happen by doing the same stuff we’ve always done, and by acting like our society is the same as it’s always been.
It’s not.
The social fabric is torn apart, there’s a serious authoritarian movement on the rise, there’s big money pushing all of that, there’s big media, there are businesses supporting it all, there’s hate rising, and there’s whitewashing of demagogues and other threatening entities. It’s time to start acting like there’s a crisis.
We have to pull ourselves out of our paralysis. The persistent, ongoing shocks are intended to keep us disengaged.
Help this nonprofit out by talking about this stuff, sharing it all over, subscribing, getting more people to subscribe, volunteering, and donating if you’re in a position to.
As noted above, we’ll activate our volunteer list here very shortly. Right now the founder is working on fundraising to keep the lights on while also trying to ramp up activity and to publicize it in the ways we can without ad funding. So we’ll see how this goes.
Keep the faith. We collectively have options. We should use them. Check out our website and our 5 Things approach to making shift happen in different ways than what Democrats and their allies have tried before.
This nonprofit is unique. Nobody else appears to be trying to go after these things. We can — if we do it together. So let’s go.