We are ten days into our second annual TPM Journalism Fund drive and I’m happy to report we’re now more than half way to our goal. I’ve heard from a lot of you who say you’ve been meaning to contribute but haven’t found a convenient moment. This is totally a convenient moment! A Saturday in June. Click right here to contribute. If you’re already a member there’s not even a lot to fill out. It’s really, really important for TPM.
I also wanted to tell you about a different kind of drive we’re going to be doing later this fall: one where we’re going to be giving things away. And part of it is we’re going to be asking your help to find people to give things to. Right? Imagine that.
So here’s the story. We’ve mentioned in various contexts that we have free memberships for two groups of people: people who lack the financial resources to afford a membership and registered students. We call these Community-Supported memberships because they’re created when people contribute any $50 increment to The TPM Journalism Fund. It’s that latter group we’re talking about here. We have free memberships for all registered students. Students can be part-time or full-time. They just have to be a registered students at some educational institution.
It’s a virtuous cycle of benefit for TPM. Readers purchase memberships through contributions to The TPM Journalism Fund, which adds resources to TPM’s budget, and we give those memberships to students. There’s an additional benefit to TPM inasmuch as most, though certainly not at all, students are young people in the period of their lives when they’re developing reading habits, finding publications that click for them, help form a world-view or become part of a community of like-minded people. So in addition to the ethical priorities of access and equity this is a path for us to find new readers and have new readers find us.
This fall it’s not only back to school but for a lot of people it will be literally back to the physical school experience for the first time almost two years. So it will be a good time for a drive to give away a lot of these memberships. For anyone interested, you don’t have to wait. They’re available now. But we’re going to spend some time reminding everybody that they’re available. In addition to reminding current readers we’re going to be asking readers: maybe your daughter is going off to college. Maybe she could use a free TPM membership? Or maybe your rising high school junior is interested in politics? Maybe he’d be interested in a membership? Or maybe they’re not your kids but your grandkids? You get the idea. And it doesn’t have to be relatives. Maybe you teach a poli-sci class and some of your students might be interested.
We’ll get into all these details at the time. But you get the idea. We all know people at various stages of their educational lives and we want to find people to join our community. That’s especially the case if they’re already readers but can’t afford to join. But maybe they haven’t heard about TPM or only know a bit about it.
In any way, that’s coming this fall. And your contributions to The TPM Journalism Fund create ‘credits’ for those members. Each increment of $50 creates one membership.
