When we officially started the Wanna Learn More Network as a 501c3, I was given a piece of advice that I sorta regret following: Don't be afraid to ask for more when it comes to donations. But like... here's the thing... I don't particularly like asking for money? Maybe it's the former homelessness thing but I recognize and appreciate the gravity of even a single dollar. And a lot of people just kinda feel bad when you ask for more and they don't have it. That doesn't feel good to me.

Which leads me to my weird tangent. Y'all remember that witchy game you used to play at sleepovers where you'd say "light as a feather stiff as a board" and you'd all lift up one friend with nothing but your first two fingers.

Well today I'm gonna ask you to finger the WLMN and run a dollar train on us. Wait. No. Fuck it. I'm leaving that one in.

If we all lift just a little bit, we can absolutely crush our goals. So let me tell you what that lift looks like in practice.

SO WHAT DOES A DOLLAR SUPPORT?

If you're kinda nerdy, you might be super interested in the software development and technology side of what we're doing. Hate speech detection algorithms, moderation software to make welcoming spaces, etc., etc., and if you're nerdy you know that servers and stuff don't come cheap even when we're being budget conscious.

Just 30 of you can cover one of the servers for our discord bot and its development.

100 of you helps to pay for more advanced tooling, bug tracking, etc., that we need to make things work well with a small dev team.

On the tech side this stuff basically scales infinitely. The more we have, the more we can create and maintain.

If you're a learning type of person:

700 of you would cover paying a part time discord moderator to work a few days a week.

These are... tough jobs, tbh. They involve sifting through lots of triggering content, dealing with folks' darkest moments, and maintaining a high degree of patience in frustrating circumstances.

Even just 50-60 of you can fund the creation of all new learning resources that can be displayed in classrooms and more. In fact some of our previous work was even shared by folks like Jamie Lee Curtis.

😍 If you care more about our advocacy work:

Deradicalizing someone takes hundreds of hours spread out over weeks but it saves families and stops damage from radiating out from hurt people. I'm proud to say over the last 6 years I've personally been able to help over 100 people leave extremist organizations with this kind of individualized attention.

1:1 sessions with families help trans kids grow up in supportive environments, save families from divorce, and more. This is perhaps the highest impact, highest joy work we get to do but it's also the least scalable. Your donations help me to train and bring new people on to do the same things I'm doing.

And what about Mutual Aid? Well we've named a mutual aid director and already assembled a team of people and literally every dollar can mean a new sticker, ad, etc., letting people know how to find us and access our mutual aid programs this year.

Linky is in the comments along with a fun little callout game to see how many of you all I can get at one time with a single callout ;)

PS: The Currency Cat is threatening me if we don't hit our goals.

May Dollar Train