Dear friends,

We are deeply grateful for your donations and your amazing support of our work.  Thanks to you and your generosity, we have achieved our fundraising goal for 2009.

As you probably remember, last June we needed to raise $40,000 in donations and monthly pledges to fund our work for the rest of 2009. This would allow us to continue our work at the current level without incurring more debt.

On June 14th, we sent an email asking for help to several thousand people — the entire community of those who have asked to receive messages from us. 

Since we sent out that email, all of you together have already given a total of $40,000 in single donations, new pledges and increases to existing pledges — 100% of what we needed. 

You might already have seen the progress graph at the top of the right sidebar on our website, but we wanted to give you a little more detail than there's room for there:

Amount Needed:
 $40,000
Total Contributions Received:
 $40,000
New Monthly Pledges (total amount until December):
 $2,590
One-Time Donations Received:
 $39,884
Percent of Need:
 100%
Total Number of Donations:
 264
Median Donation:
 $60
Average Donation:
 $141

 

In the past we have tended to shy away from saying much about the financial aspect of our work. For the first seven years we solicited donations at public meetings and on our website as unobtrusively as possible, and we charged fees for special events like Weekend Intensives and Five Day Retreats.  Over time we learned how to live and work well enough with what we had.

Then, in 2006, an insight began to dawn on us as to the actual nature and cause of the change that had overtaken our lives — a way to understand and speak about the gradual erosion of neurotic care and concern, the gradual loss of interest in those mental melodramas that had held us in thrall for so long. That insight is so simple once seen, and so radical and primal a departure from what we had thought to be the case, that we thought it might actually hold universal value for all of humanity. Because of this, we immediately stopped charging fees for our events.

Somewhat surprisingly, this has had very little effect on finances. The three years of charging nothing have been pretty much like the seven years of charging fees — sometimes up, sometimes down, but always trending down deeper into debt. Until finally, last June, I was forced to ask for help — and help came.

We won't be as shy in the future to talk about money. We're developing a way to make information about our actual, ongoing financial situation available to anyone who wants to know.

Thank you again for your donation, and even more for your willingness to do something so simple as to look at yourself for yourself and see what happens.

In love,
John and Carla