We’re taking a break
But we’ll be back! We just need a breather.
Hi neighbors! What an incredible month it’s been. Nearly 200 people rallied against cuts to the Tenderloin in the city’s proposed budget, many shared their funding priorities at Public Comment Day, and then huge swaths of the cuts to nonprofit organizations and programs were restored. We were excited, proud, and energized to help mobilize the community for budget justice, and to report on the final days of negotiations and actions around the city’s spending plan.
We've been sprinting since we first came to this community in May of last year, exploring whether there was a desire for the kind of newsroom that we were proposing. After launching the newsroom in January, we kept sprinting and published 50 stories and three zine editions. We even picked up the pace once it became clear how big the stakes were for the Tenderloin in this year’s budget negotiations.
Now that the budget season has come to a close, it’s a good time for us to pause, recover, and figure out our next moves.
We’ve been in startup mode, with each of us involved in every aspect of the newsroom (content creation, yes, but also editing, fundraising, promotion, organizational structure, budgeting, operations, print production, collaborations, project management, and strategy). And that’s on top of working other jobs to pay our bills, because we have been volunteering our time for the Tenderloin Voice. That part — working for free — can’t go on indefinitely. We need to move into a phase that is sustainable, not just financially but in a way that keeps us from burning out.
Help us build this newsroom — consider making a contribution today.
Every dollar from a community member is a vote of confidence in this approach to journalism. Thank you!
Doing so will require us to step back and re-examine our goals and how to reach them. We’ll need to think strategically about how to apply the lessons we’ve learned in six months of running this newsroom. And we’ll focus more intensely on fundraising and developing our revenue models. Before we dive into that, we need to restore our personal resources so we can take on this challenge with the care and enthusiasm it requires.
To that end, the Tenderloin Voice will completely stop producing material and sending newsletters for about 4 weeks. Our site and calendar will still be up. We won’t be entering event information into the calendar while we’re away, so if you need help adding an event, please let us know about upcoming items as soon as you can. If you’re comfortable creating your own calendar items, the submission button will still work while we’re away.
Our break starts July 13. We’ll be back, refreshed and ready to double down, August 10.
We do need this, but we’ll miss you and we’re excited to keep going.
See you soon!
Laura, Noah, and Daphne
