During this upcoming season of giving, we are making a special appeal. We are in deep financial straits. In a most un-trauma-informed move, a major foundation which had assured us that we would receive a second year of funding unexpectedly reversed course shortly before we were due to receive a $500,000 grant from them.
We’re fortunate t
o have a couple of funders who are providing support from January through December 2023. But we didn’t have enough funding remaining this year to take us through the end of this quarter, so we’ve cut our pay and time by 50%. If you’ve been through something like this, you know the hardship of making one paycheck last for two months. And almost all staff will be laid off for the month of December.
So, we’re modeling what we’ve written about for others for the last 11 years, quoting authority after authority about the need for people affected by trauma to “ask for help.”
We are asking you, our 57,300+ members, to make a donation, preferably, a monthly donation.
Because we’ve been funded by grants from generous donors over the last few years, we haven’t relied on donations. During a year-end funding campaign two years ago we received an unexpected matching gift of $50,000; you were kind enough to grow that to $105,000.
We are deeply grateful for that support, and for the $22,190 you donated over the last six months, since we began telling you of our situation. And now, as we enter the season of year-end giving, we ask for whatever you can give to assist PACEs Connection in its efforts to continue to solve our communities’ most intractable problems.
Given the current non-profit funding system, which tends to support organizations for only two or three years, we began planning six years ago to become self-supporting. That’s because we know that it will take communities 20 to 40 years to integrate policies and practices based on PACEs science. Earlier this year, we began accelerating those plans by diversifying our revenue streams.
- We’re offering paid events (after doing more than 100 free webinars in 2020 and 2021), including a much-anticipated Collective Grief, Collective Healing conference.
- We’re providing our expertise to create trauma-informed schools, trauma-informed workplaces that are anti-racist organizations, and helping local initiatives build partnerships to increase their funding and accelerate their growth.
- We continue to recruit communities to join our Cooperative of Communities, which we launched in late 2019, only to see our progress delayed by COVID. The Coop offers unique and sophisticated tracking tools and other benefits to help community PACEs initiatives to accelerate growth, reduce ACEs and increase positive childhood experiences. Communities pay $5,000 a year for tools and benefits that would cost an individual community $80,000 to develop themselves.
- Recruiting foundations to partner with us in our work. Besides the obvious consequence of losing much-needed funding, the loss of the $500,000 grant put us in the position of losing precious time to find another funder. Acquiring funding takes, on average, 18 months from first contact to money in the bank. Most funders won’t accept unsolicited requests for funding. You have to know someone who can provide an introduction.
Over the next couple of months, you won’t experience much of a difference in what you see from us. We’ll keep delivering the Daily Digest and Weekly Roundup, which we’ve provided for free for more than a decade. We’ll continue to provide support and training to the 440 or so cross-sector geographic communities and 40 or so interest-based communities that have free pages – their own mini-websites – on our site. We’ll keep offering our free Creating Resilient Communities trainings to the general public, and our Growing Resilient Communities trainings for managers of community initiatives.
We’ll be posting about our fundraising efforts, and asking some of you to post about what PACEs Connection has meant to you, your community, your growth and development as a human, parent, professional. If you’d like to share a video or a testimonial about the importance of our work, please do. We’d love to hear from you and ask that whether you post or not, to make a gift, preferably a monthly gift, to help us keep doing the work.
You can make your tax-deductible gift here. You can post a blog yourself (here are instructions for a blog.)
In the meantime, thank you for all you do in your life, your home, your community, your corner of the world, to help prevent and heal childhood trauma, to help build healthier, more resilient and compassionate communities.
Carey Sipp
Director of Strategic Partnerships
PACEs Connection
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