We had some great news this week: The Seattle Foundation came through with $30,000 to support our organizing work. That boosts our front-page fundraising speedometer to the point where my 1993 Toyota Corolla starts shaking.

Many people have chipped in to get us where we are both this year and in years past. Every time we receive a gift, I feel great gratitude for the community of generous and decent people who make our work possible.

Our fund drives aren’t just a means of raising the money we need to continue. They are an affirmation of all that we do.

The caring community that surrounds our vendors. The opportunity for self-help. Our critical work as a local independent media resource. Our unique role as a watchdog and catalyst on issues of homelessness and poverty. Our effective activism.

I love that each day, because of Real Change, for a moment or two, hundreds of people— sometimes thousands of people—who might otherwise have nothing whatsoever to do with each other establish a connection that plants a seed.

There is pain in the world. And there is privilege. The relationship is complicated and all too often ignored. By getting at this, we come to what it means to be authentically engaged in the process of social change.

Creating a different reality isn’t a huge, overwhelming impossibility. It comes down to thousands of small things that happen everyday.

So your support of our work—by buying the paper, by making a donation, by taking action, by telling a friend—matters. When we all do our part, things add up.

We are in the final days of our fund drive, and even with the support from the Seattle Foundation, are almost $52K short of raising our $140,000. It is, truly, an audacious goal. Our development guy Joe has a saying I like. He says, “scared money don’t make none.” We asked ourselves how much money we really need to get to where we’d need to be, and that amount became the goal.

This is nearly twice what we raised during last year’s drive.

Last night, our board began the process of a mid-year budget and planning review. That sounds bureaucratic and boring, but it’s what successful organizations do. We compare what we said we were going to do to what actually happened and make adjustments to cope with reality.

Our reality is that our hopes for foundation support this year are very much at odds with the funding environment. Funders are overwhelmed by the wreckage of decades of bad public policy, and, as the federal government continues to retreat from its social responsibilities, they are increasingly left holding the bag.

This means enormous competition and narrower and narrower specialization in what gets funded. Organizations like ours, which are neither fish nor fowl, tend to lose.

Our friends at the Seattle Foundation notwithstanding, big foundations don’t often support organizing for social justice, no matter how effective or well conceived. There’s a reason that it’s called “charity.”

This is why we need your support. There’s work to be done. We’re good at doing it. We need resources to pull it off. About 35 percent of our support is income from the paper itself. Less than 20 percent comes from foundations. That leaves people like you.

It’s easy to take the work that we do for granted, but papers like Real Change help make social change movements possible. We are a progressive institution. Like a tree, our strength comes from the ground up.

Real Change is an open book. We depend upon our readers for nearly half of our support and believe that you deserve to know what we know. That’s why we’ve made pretty much everything about ourselves public at realchange.wikispaces.com.

Want to read our board minutes? You can. Want to look over our strategic plan and tell me what you think? I’d love to hear from you. Want to see our latest circulation numbers? Read our fundraising plan? Review the high points of our thirteen-year history? It’s all there.

Our next issue will go to bed on Monday night so our vendors can get it the day before the holiday. All donations received by then will count toward the final fund drive total. Please make a secure online donation at www.realchangenews.org or send a check to 2129 2nd Ave., Seattle, WA 98121. You make the difference.