#Nonprofit

[mostlycatsmostly]

Redner's Rescued Cat Figurine Mewseum located in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin is home to over 3,500 figurines. You can visit the museum on the third Sunday of each month from April to December during their open house days. Alternatively, if you give a 24-hour notice, you can schedule an appointment. All proceeds and donations from the museum's operations go to local cat rescue organizations and shelters in Wisconsin.

#cats #mewseum #nonprofit #this is amazing #road trip

[rosalind2013]

I say this as someone who works at a nonprofit: the attitude “someone who has nothing will be grateful for anything” is harmful and dehumanizing when it’s used to justify donating something ripped, stained, or expired to someone less fortunate.

Homeless people deserve clothing with good structural integrity. Victims of house fires deserve linens that are free of stains. No one should have to eat expired food. It’s disrespectful to give people scraps when they’re already hurting.

Please, out of respect for your fellow humans, check the dates on your food donations before you drop them off.

#PSA #food drive #food pantry #homelessness #charity work #nonprofit

[acivildawn]

About A Civil Dawn

A Civil Dawn is a nonprofit publishing company focused on ensuring the creation of media which is educational and positive representation for LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent people. We aim to do this by enabling and amplifying creators whose work aligns with our mission and goals. Our current focus is on web comic creators but we are excited for future projects like publishing zines and graphic novels, children's books, and other media from creators who match with our mission and values.

This blog will be used for announcements about the company, reblogs of content from our creators and other posts which align with our goals, and original posts and links to content created within ACD. Please feel free to send asks and DMs but please direct any business inquiries or non-Tumblr related discourse to us at [email protected].

This post will be updated as we add to the below list of creators who we work with: @brooke2valley @alienbycomics @kaylasartwork @deadeyedfae @welldrawnfish

Manifesto

To be a person is to overcome Ick - trauma, fear, pain, and shame. By shining a light and promising hope we will reduce and heal the collective Ick to make the world brighter for everyone.

Because everyone deserves hope.

Mission

Reaching out to hearts and minds to wipe away Ick and empowering great people to reach even farther.

Values

Broadcast Hope

Partner for Good

Foster Understanding

Represent Everyone

#A Civil Dawn #Ick #lgbtqia+ #neurodivergent #publishing #web comic #nonprofit

[copperbadge]

Hey Sam! Since it's currently AO3 donation time, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it? I'm asking because you've written RPF and it's one of many "anti-AO3/anti-AO3 donations" people's favourite things to bring up when they're complaining about AO3 getting so many donations that it continuously obtains an excess of its donation goal whenever donation time rolls around? (Wow, how many times can I say "donation" in an ask?) Sorry if this question bothers you! I don't mean to offend or annoy.

Hey anon! Sorry it took a while to get to this, I don't even know if the drive is still going on, but the question came in while I was traveling and I didn't really have the time for stuff that wasn't travel-related. In any case, let's dig in! (I am not offended, no worries.)

So really there are two issues here and as much as some people who are critical of AO3 want to conflate them, they are different. While some criticism of AO3 may be valid, rhetoric against AO3 tends to misinterpret both in separate ways.

First there's the issue of what AO3 hosts -- RPF, yes, but more broadly, varied content that some people find distasteful or think should be illegal, which is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the archive and more broadly a dangerous attitude towards the concept of freedom of expression.

Second, there's the issue of AO3 generally outpacing its fundraising goals while not allowing monetization, which is a misunderstanding of the legal status of AO3 and to an extent a misunderstanding of philanthropy as a whole.

The longer I watch debates about content go on, the more I come to the conclusion that I was fortunate to have a teacher who really wanted to instill in us an understanding of free speech not as a policy but as an ongoing dialogue. It's not only that freedom of expression "protects you from the government, not the Justin" as the meme goes, but also that freedom of expression is not a static thing. It's an ongoing process of identifying what we find harmful in society and what we want to do about it.

Should the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater be restricted? Should the freedom to yell slurs at drag performers? Should the freedom to teach prepubescent kids about gender, sexuality, and/or safe sex? Should the freedom to wear a leather puppy hood at Pride? Who gets to say, and why?

I was nine when my teacher did a unit on freedom of speech and the intersection of "harm prevention" and "censorship", which is (and should be) a discussion, not a set of ironclad rules. This ambiguity has thus been with me for over thirty years, and I'm comfortable with the ambiguity, with the process; I'm not sure a lot of people critical of AO3's content truly are. Perhaps some can't be, especially those affected by hate speech, but RPF is not hate speech. It's just fiction. Or is fiction "just fiction"? This is a question society as a whole is grappling with, although fandom seems to be a little out ahead of society in terms of how explicitly we discuss it.

The idea that prose can incite violence or cause harm is both valid to examine (witness the rise of fascism on the radio in the 20s, on Facebook and Twitter in the past ten years; they're very similar processes) and a very slippery slope. Because again: who decides what harm is, and what causes it, and what we do about it? Our values align us with certain beliefs, but those are only our values, not universal truths. So AO3 is part of the ongoing question of harm and benefit both to society and individuals.

AO3 itself, however, has a fairly defined policy that it is not meant to police content; it is an archive, not a bookstore or a school board. AO3 refines its TOS and policies as necessary, but the goal is always open access and as much freedom of expression as possible, and if that's uncomfortable for some people then that's a discussion we have to have; ignoring it won't make it go away. But it has to be a discussion, it can't be a unilateral change to the archive's TOS or a series of snaps and clapbacks, and I don't see a lot of people ready to move beyond flinging insults. Perhaps because they were taught a much more binary view of freedom of expression than I was.

So, self-evidently, I support AO3 and I don't have a problem with RPF. Whether other people do is something we're going to have to get to grips with, and that's likely to be a process that is still going on when most of us are dust. I'd rather have a century of ambiguity than a wrong answer tomorrow, anyway.

But whether AO3 hosts RPF is truly a separate issue from its donation drives, because it's a criticism some people level at the site which exists whether it's fundraising or not. So people can criticize AO3's open policy and they can give it as a reason not to support the site, but it's just one aspect of the archive and the fundraising as a whole should be examined separately.

I think AO3's fundraisers are deeply misunderstood (sometimes on purpose) because even people who are anticapitalist get a little crazy when money gets involved, and this is, to fandom, a lot of money -- a few hundred thousand, reliably, every fundraiser. To me, a fundraiser that pulls in three hundred grand is almost quaint; my current nonprofit pulls in better than ten million a year and my previous employer had an endowment of several billion dollars. At my old job I didn't even bother researching people who couldn't give us a hundred grand.

On the other hand, AO3 is an extreme and astounding outlier in the nonprofit world, because basically it's the only one of its kind to work the way it does. It is entirely volunteer-run on the operational side (ie: tag wranglers, coders, lawyers, etc) and has no fundraising staff (gift officers, researchers, outreach officers) as far as I'm aware. To pull in three hundred grand from individual one-time donations, without any paid staff and without even a volunteer fundraising officer? That's insane. That doesn't happen. Except at AO3.

What people misunderstand, however, is the basic status of a nonprofit, which is a legal status, not simply a social one. (I'm adding in some corrections here since it gets complicated and the terminology can be important!) The Organization for Transformative Works, the parent of AO3, is a nonprofit, which indicates how it was incorporated as an organization; additionally it is registered federally as tax-exempt, which carries certain perks, like not paying sales tax, and certain duties, like making their financials transparent to a certain extent. (Religious nonprofits are exempt from the transparency requirement.) If you're interested in more about nonprofits and tax-exempt status a reader dropped a great article here.

Nonprofits, unlike for-profit companies, cannot pay a share of their income to stakeholders. Nonprofits don't have financial stakeholders, only donors. They can have employees and pay them a salary -- that's me, for example -- but if a nonprofit pulls in $10M in donations, my salary is paid from that, I don't get a percentage and nobody else does either. That's what it means to be a nonprofit -- the money above operational costs goes back into the organization. The donations we (and AO3) receive must be plowed under and used for outreach, server maintenance, further fundraising, services expansion, et cetera. You can see this in the 990 forms on Guidestar or ProPublica, or in their more accessible breakdowns on Charity Navigator. Nonprofits that do not put the majority of their income towards service provision tend to get audited and lose their nonprofit status. So nobody's getting paid from all that money, and the overage that isn't spent goes into what is basically a savings account in the name of the nonprofit. (I'm vastly simplifying but that's the gist.) Using that money for personal purposes is illegal. It's called "private inurement" and there's a good article here about it. The money belongs to the OTW as a concept, not to anyone in or of the OTW.

So the biggest misunderstanding that I see in people who are mad at AO3 fundraisers is that "they" are getting all this money (who "they" are is never clearly stated but I'm pretty sure people think @astolat has a special wifi router that runs on burning hundred dollar bills) while "we" can't monetize our fanfic. But "they" get nothing -- nobody even earns a salary from AO3 -- and you can easily prove that by looking at the 990 forms they file with the government, which are required to be made public. You can see the most recently available 990, from 2020, here at Guidestar. Page seven will show you the "highest compensated" employees, all of whom are earning zero dollars or nonmonetary perks (that's the three columns on the right).

Either AO3 is entirely volunteer-run or someone's Doing A Real Fraud. The money the OTW spends is documented (that's page 10 and 11 primarily) and while they may pay for, say, the travel and lodging expenses of a lawyer going to DC to defend a freedom-of-expression case, they don't pay the lawyer for their time, or give them a cut of the income.

Despite what you've read, the reason "we" can't monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it's because

IT'S ILLEGAL.

I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.

You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit's website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.

Okay, that was a sidebar, but in some ways not, because it gets to the heart of the real complaints about AO3 fundraising, which is that people in fandom are sick or unhoused or in some form of need and other people in fandom are giving to AO3, a fan site that is financially stable, instead of giving to peoples' gofundmes or dropping money in their Ko-Fi or Paypal. And while it is a legitimate grievance that there are people who are in such desperate need while we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, that's not AO3's fault. AO3 doesn't solicit actively, there's no unasked-for mailings or calls from a gift officer. They just put a banner up on their website, and people give. (Again, this is incredibly outlier behavior in the nonprofit world, I'd do a case study on it but the conclusion would just be "shit's real, yo.") You might as well be mad that people give to their local food bank instead of someone's ko-fi.

You cannot lay at AO3's feet the fact that people want to give to AO3 instead of to your fundraiser. That's a choice individuals have made, and while you can engage with them in terms of why they made the philanthropic choices they did, to blame an organization they supported rather than the person who made the choice to give is not only incorrect but futile, and unlikely to win anyone over to supporting you. We know from research that guilt is not a tremendous motivator of philanthropy.

It is also not necessarily a binary choice; just because AO3 gets a hundred grand in $5 donations doesn't mean most of the people giving don't also give $5 elsewhere. I support the OTW on occasion, and I also fundraise for UNICEF and the Chicago Parks Foundation and BAGLY and others, in addition to giving monthly to several nonprofits that I have longterm relationships with -- my alma mater, the animal rescue where I got the Cryptids, my shul. And I give, occasionally and anonymously, to fundraisers that pass through Radio Free Monday, which are mainly individuals in need, because I was once in need and now I pay it forward. These are the choices I have made. Nobody twisted my arm. I respond poorly to someone making the attempt to do so by attacking places I've given.

I think the upshot is, after all of this that I've written, that we cannot begin to come to grips with questions of institutional inequality in philanthropy, or freedom of expression and censorship, until people actually understand what's going on, and too few do. So all I can do is try and explain, and hopefully create a forum for people to learn and grow when it comes to charitable giving.

Archive Of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works are products of our community and as that community changes, we will necessarily continue to re-evaluate what aspects of it mean and how AO3/OTW express the community sentiment. I hope that the ongoing discussion of support for AO3 also leads to people learning more about their philanthropic options. But criticizing AO3 for fundraising by attacking it for fulfilling one of its stated purposes is silly, and attempting to guilt people into giving in the ways one thinks they should give rather than how they do give is just going to make one extremely unlikable.

As members of this community, we have to be a part of the push and pull, but it's difficult to do that competently in ignorance. So, I do my best to be knowledgeable and to educate my readers, and I hope others will do the same.

#ao3 #otw #nonprofit #fundraisers #ao3 nonprofit #that's my new tag for posts like this #if anyone has any of the earlier posts I've done drop a comment in them so I see the post and can tag it #archive

[itgetsbetterproject]

🏳️‍⚧️ We're trying to raise $200,000 for LGBTQ+ youth programs before the end of the year! 🏳️‍🌈 Wanna help?

As they grow up in a world that wants to keep them down, LGBTQ+ youth are fighting to be themselves. But we believe young, queer people shouldn’t have to be "brave" just to exist.

By making a donation to support our programs, you're showing that you believe in the better world that we can create together.

Over the past couple years, the support we've gotten from some amazing donors has enabled us to support queer youth in SO many ways, like:

Granting LGBTQ+ students more than $1.2 million to imagine and create their own safe spaces and resources in schools across the US and Canada through 50 States, 50 Grants.

Creating award-winning content series educating LGBTQ+ youth on safe sex ed, inclusive terminology, careers in STEM, as well as tons more educational and mental health resources.

Handing LGBTQ+ youth the mic to advocate for themselves — at national conferences, on our award-winning Twitch vodcast Perfectly Queer, on social media, and in interviews with major news outlets...

...and so much more that you can see on itgetsbetter.org!

🟣 If you believe in "better" the way we do and want to help us keep doing this work to uplift, empower, and connect LGBTQ+ youth around the world, you can make a donation here!

#it gets better #queer youth #lgbtq youth #trans youth #trans kids #lgbtqia #queer #nonprofit #philanthropy #support trans kids

[onenicebugperday]

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, one of my favorite non-profits, is doing a fundraiser and selling shirts! You can pre-order one now and they ship in early October. Already ordered mine :)

Order here to support their excellent cause!

If you don’t want a shirt, you can still donate to Xerces here.

There’s only one design, but here are a few of the different shirt options:

#fundraiser #nonprofit #insects #bugs #conservation #nature #bugblr

[dianyucu]

Tired of language learning apps constantly downgrading for profit? Introducing Lingonaut Project

We've all seen previously great language learning apps such as Duolingo or Busuu gradually losing quality, because of the owners always looking for more ways to make money. That is why a programmer and language fan by the name of Dr.Greenboys on Discord decided to do something about it, and start his own project, with a strict non-profit policy, never to be sold to the stock market, and premium tiers only giving aesthetic benefits, instead of not being able to pay money damaging the service's ability to teach you a language. It is still in development, but I am really happy to have found this project, and wanted to share it with the world.

Did I mention that, unlike Duolingo, we'll take volunteers for pretty much any language as long as the volunteers are fluent in it?

Anyways, you can find the project's page at https://lingonaut.app/

#duolingo #langblr #language learning #minority languages #volunteers needed #nonprofit #lingonaut

[mahmoud0qassas]

Help Mahmoud’s family evacuate from Gaza

https://gofund.me/a8f4d9ff

#gaza strip #education #diy #free gaza #gaza #free palestine #gazaunderattack #gaza genocide #nonprofit #nature

[transformativeworks]

The OTW is Recruiting for Open Doors Administrative Volunteers

Do you have interest in the rescue and preservation of fanworks? The OTW is recruiting Open Doors Administrative Volunteers! Read more at: https://otw.news/cde8fb

#otw #organization for transformative works #volunteer #nonprofit #open doors

[limeaesth]

Killua

#zen #anime #photography #meditation #spirituality #picoftheday #pictures #nonprofit #aesthetic #green #gon hxh #hxh spoilers #hxh 2011 #hxh hisoka #hxh manga #killua hxh #hxh chrollo #hxh x reader #hunter hunter #hunter x hunter #killua aesthetic #gon x killua #killuaxgon

[satlokashram]

कबीर, अभ्यागत आगम निरखि, आदर मान समेत। भोजन छाजन, बित यथा, सदा काल जो देत।। भावार्थ:- आपके घर पर कोई अतिथि आ जाए तो आदर के साथ भोजन तथा बिछावना अपनी वित्तीय स्थिति के अनुसार सदा समय देना चाहिए।

#spirituality #satlokashram #god #saintrampalji #nonprofit #santrampalji is trueguru #writing #fashion #science #funny

[transformationsproject]

We have lots of good news this week, from Texas, California, Arizona, and the American Psychological Association! 🏳️‍⚧️

#trans rights #transgender #trans formations project #lgbt #nonprofit #trans

[beggars-opera]

Working in a nonprofit museum. The assumption is that only those who are wealthy enough to not need money should work here. Well joke’s on you I’m living in a cardboard box but it is lovingly designed in the Queen Anne shingle style using stolen office sharpie. Now whose masters degree is worthless?

#museums #nonprofit #capitalism

[lokisarium]

with more than admiration I admire

your azure veins, your alabaster skin

your coral lips

your snow-white dimpled chin

#I am so lost in their connection #and everything they mean to eachother #loki #thorki #aicreation #asgard #a.i.artworks #thor cares for loki #a.i.images #thor and loki #og thor #og loki #shakespearian #nonprofit #thunderfrost

[the-briny-bulletin]

CareForGaza is a nonprofit charity that donates money and food to those in Gaza. Donate if you can!

Paypal link:

Twitter link:

EDIT:

Check on twitter/X first before donating

#palestine #human rights #free palestine #gaza #gaza strip #free gaza strip #free gaza #charity #nonprofit #palestians #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #palestine conflict #save gaza strip #save palestine #save palestinians #geopolitics #important #middle east #free palestine 🇵🇸 #🇵🇸 #🍉 #please donate #non profit

[askana05]

- E o que ela come? - Ela fuma.

#borboletana #princesa ana #garotas bonitas não comem #35mm #nonprofit #ana brasil #ana food diary #transtornoalimentar #analog #moon