Send us your ideas about funding…
It’s been a long time since I posted here and about a year since I left Iran. Now my work for MideastYouth is mainly in the background: working to make this loose organization of bloggers, readers, commenters, reporters, and activists one that can be sustained over time.
You might not realize how much work Esra’a and others do behind the scenes just to keep this network of sites and organization up and running. Trust me, MideastYouth is more than a full time job!
This year, we are trying to raise money and are wondering what you think. We want to beef up Afghan Press, add lots and lots of translations to the site (into and from Arabic and Persian mainly), increase original multimedia production and, simply, become more professional.
We are looking at several sources: the EU, for instance, has funding for programs that promote free speech in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, there are foundations like HIVOS and Mama Cash. We would love to be self-funded, but face it, that’s expensive. Advertising doesn’t bring in enough cash yet either, maybe it will one day.
We have had long (believe me!) conversations about which types of organizations to approach for funding, and have all agreed that we would never accept money from a group or individual who would want to control our content or change our mission. Trust me when I tell you, if we were willing to betray our mission, we could have funded MEY a hundred times over.
Let us know what you think about our efforts to find funding. If you have ideas or recommendations, leave them here. We’ll be listening.
–Tori
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I think we (if I still have the right to say ‘we’) have reached a point where we must place ADs on the site. This has been avoided for tons of reasons but there are resources out there that will allow us to place ADs in a more strategic and content appropriate way.
DB, what we are looking for is serious funding and sponsorship to go way beyond what we are currently doing, which ADs cannot possibly provide. We do not have the traffic required for our ADs to be successful enough to generate more than a few bucks every other month, they’re great for personal blogs but not for sites that aim to really grow. ADs will never really be used for this site for a variety of different reasons, other than being distracting and unnecessary, but mostly for the fact that it’s completely irrelevant in terms of what we are going after here. People are wrong when they look at our work and assume that this site is the extent of it. We host over 80 websites in the world and fund at least 4 of our other projects to help them grow. We also have an active media production team and aim to do much more than what is financially possible.
We require thousands and thousands of dollars to continue our operations and maintain our dedicated servers, grow Afghan Press to live up to what we aspire it to be, and to consistently increase the volume of our work all the while funding other great projects who need independent support. This is the idea. ADs are completely out of the question for us to generate that kind of income, to professionalize enough to have a team of essential staff members to handle the increasing amount of day-to-day operations of this growing network. We also registered as an NGO right now, a costly process, no NGO in the world relies on a few ADs to exist on a fulltime basis.
What Tori is suggesting here is that people list a few relevant organizations (digital media/technology for social change) that we can be comfortable enough getting independent support from, knowing they’re doing it to help empower us as individuals and our ideas, and not to further their political/religious agendas, which is often the case with the organizations who DO approach us for help.
So it’s not about what money we get, we can get any amount we want if we were going to exchange that for our values, but anyone who offers money to this point are doing it with only their interests in mind and not because they believe in us and what we are independently capable of. We want organizations who can guarnatee that their partnership will not interfere in our leadership.
http://www.idealist.org/
Idealist is a site of many ngos around the world; while it is mostly used for employment purposes with a bit of research on types of organizations some grants/partnership opportunities also might be available.
http://www.witness.org/index.php
Witness is a great NPO that specifically focuses on improving human rights through media, but I am not sure if they award grants to other orgs or just partner with them…
http://www.guidestar.org/
Guidestar is a good resource for US based orgs, it gives donors an inside look at what $ goes where. It could also be used for searching for orgs that award grants.
Has anyone tried to get 501c3 status within the US? Most US based foundations that award grants (ie, Bill and Melinda Gates foundation) do so only to organizations that have 501c3 status. I don’t know a ton about it, but I would assume there is an equivalent status for groups that have already gotten NGO status outside the US. I know that my suggestions are very much US centric, but since that is where my experience is with NPOs, it’s all I have to offer. I hope it helps and if I come across anything else I will post it here or email MEY directly.
Esra’a
…….So you’re saying no ADs, right?
Jessica, thanks for all your suggestions. We’ll consider them.
DB,
Esra’a, here’s another tool: http://fconline.foundationcenter.org/maps/
That map is really useful to see what US-based foundations give granst to organizations in what countries and what those grants focus on. Part of the site is subscription only but you should be able to glean a lot of information from the non-subscription sections too…
hope this helps.