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In Other Words is a non-profit, volunteer-run, feminist community center in Portland, Oregon. Our mission is to support, enrich, and empower our feminist communities through literature, art, and educational and cultural events. We have a storefront that serves as a book store, lending library, and venue for feminist community organizing meetings and events.
In Other Words is facing closure
Most years, October is a month of joy and gratitude as we celebrate our birthday. This year, on our 21st birthday, felt bittersweet as we held an urgent community meeting on October 5th to talk about our capacity deficits and the fact that we are seriously considering closing our doors. We heard your voices loud and clear that you don't want this to happen and that you are committed to having In Other Words around for years to come. We gave ourselves until the end of the month to increase our capacity. At the next public community meeting on November 8th, met to determine whether we have built enough capacity (re)commit to In Other Words so that we don't have to go out of business. The result of that meeting was that we have the volunteer and board capacity to make it through December 2015, but we need to keep fundraising in order to financially make it through 2015.
That said, now comes the hard part. It is time to walk the walk. We are in need of serious funding, and a serious increase in our volunteer capacity and our board of directors membership. Part of increasing our volunteer leadership and board leadership includes asking YOU to help us lead In Other Words towards becoming the open and affirming feminist community organizing space we all crave and desire.
In addition to our critical need of increasing our volunteer base and developing our board of directors, we hope to raise at least $20,000 in order to keep our doors open, and ideally need to meet our annual goal of $60,000 in order to remain sustainable. It costs us a bare minimum $5,000 per month in order just to squeak by, and we need all the support you can give in order for us to stay open into the year 2015.
We need to do some serious fundraising in the form of financial donations, and serious "friendraising" in the form of recruiting new volunteers and new board members:
-->To join our volunteer family, please email us your contact info and a little bit about yourself! volunteer@inotherwords.org!
-->To join our board of directors, please send us an email at humanresources@inotherwords.org to express interest, or to send us your resume and cover letter to apply for a board position.
We have just a few weeks in order to build up our capacity in terms of new volunteers, new board members, and new donations. If we haven't met our capacity goals by December, we will need to close our doors. Please contribute to this campaign to help us ensure that is not the case!
The question we get most often is, "but don't you make zillions of dollars off of the TV show Portlandia?!" The short answer is: NOPE. Far from it. Unfortunately, the fact that the TV show Portlandia features a regular feminist bookstore parody does not provide us with any substantial revenue flow and Portlandia-related donations are far from enough to pay our bills. We aren't rolling in money from Portlandia, but we do have a great time meeting local celebrities Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, and we enjoy chatting with them about feminism and community organizing in between shoots.
Here's a photo of us with Carrie and Fred:
As you well know, we are an entirely volunteer-run feminist nonprofit community space that truly relies on volunteers and donations to keep going.
Please help us increase our volunteer and board leadership, and please make generous financial gifts if you are able, in order to help In Other Words continue to grow in to the passionate, committed, brave, resilient feminist community organizing space we all need and want.
Please visit our website and our blog for more information about In Other Words!
