For nearly five years, ACPC has been telling the stories mainstream outlets wouldn't cover. We need you to keep doing it.

TLDR: We give away our work for free. We do it because it's how we serve our community. But we can't keep doing it unless the community starts paying something for it, otherwise we have to go find other jobs. Then those uncovered stories stay uncovered. So, we said, let's make the big ask. We need to raise $65K to keep this ship running for the next four months.

The backstory

This project launched as an all-volunteer effort. It remained that way for nearly two years. We worked gig jobs, full time jobs and odd jobs, anything we could do to pay rent while dedicating the rest of our time to doing the thing that we loved: serving our community through our reporting.

When the City of Atlanta launched its effort to build Cop City, ACPC rose up to make sure Atlantans knew what has happening. ACPC told the true history of the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. ACPC published the emails the city never wanted you to see. ACPC broke the news that the attorney general planned to indict protesters. ACPC released the investigation that uncovered how city leaders had mislead the public for years about the real cost of the training center.

We did most of that without making a cent.

On the back of that work, we built a newsroom run by people doing the reporting.

We hired staff. We built a team of freelancers. And we fought for years to deliver the news to you for free.

What we didn't do well was ask our community to support us financially.

Asking for money from our readers isn't in our DNA. And so we depended on some great philanthropic orgs who got our mission to keep us afloat.

But the times they are a changin.

We can't keep doing this without you.

Here's the problem...

The money we get from philanthropic orgs comes in chunks, sometimes months apart. It takes up a lot of time to write grant applications and grant reports. It takes weeks to months to hear back whether we're getting funding. It wasn't sustainable. We hit a wall. We've already had to make adjustments. We're reducing our staffing. Our amazing managing editor, Karina Teichert, is headed to another fantastic organization.

In our worst case scenario, we need to cut our budget by 66%. Most of our budget (about 78%) went to staffing costs. Another 15% went to our freelancers. The remaining 7% is overhead, mostly in technology services.

So, the easiest place to cut is our staffing cost.

The remaining three full time team members may stop being employees. We'd be contractors. That means we may have to go without health insurance for a while. (That one hurts, some of us didn't have health insurance before this. We got used to seeing doctors. It was nice.)

We're going to do what we have to do to keep this thing running. But unless we can raise the funding we need, there will be less of the stories you've come to rely on. That's less coverage on the ICE warehouses. Less coverage of people in the streets fighting fascism. Less coverage holding our local government accountable. Less coverage of police surveillance.

And let's face it, we all know we need more of that. Not less.

So we're asking you...

Give. Give big. And give now. We have money coming in down the line. But we need $65K to get us from point A to point B. That's 65K to keep our employed with health insurance. That's $65K to keep a team of freelancers investigating what happens in this city. That's $65K to keep track of what happens in the Atlanta City Council every week. It's $65k to make sure we can cover the next protest and the one after that and the one after that. It's $65k so we can share the stories of communities organizing against ICE warehouses.

It's $65K so that Atlanta doesn't start slipping into a news desert.

And we're asking you to help us fundraise. Share this with your coworkers. Ask your company match your donation. Talk about how important independent news is on LinkedIn and drop this link. Convert everyone else in your group chat to an ACPC supporter. Hold a party to raise money, tell us about it, we'll do our best to show up.

Be our community advocates like we try to advocate for our community.

If we don't quite reach our goal, we'll stay slim and accept that we have to do less for now.
If we exceed it, we can get back to work faster, stop spending our time focused on fundraising and start doing what we do best: good effing journalism.
If we don't come close, we'll be transparent. We'll keep trying. But we'll be back to doing this in our spare time for a little while.

But we think this matters to Atlanta. We think as Atlanta goes, so goes the South. As the South goes so goes the country. We think this city can show the world what good community-funded news looks like.

Keep ACPC telling the stories Atlanta needs

Step up and fight for a better Atlanta

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