fandomtrumpshate | FTH -- policy on outside organizations (Reply)

As noted on the page listing this year’s supported nonprofits, we are sticking with last year’s policy of allowing creators choose to support a single additional organization, so long as it’s broadly in keeping with the overall FTH mission. While we believe that it’s important and worthwhile to use FTH’s platform to direct attention and support toward smaller, less well-known organizations, we understand that you may feel very strongly about a particular cause that is being addressed by some larger group.

Therefore: any creator who chooses a small subset of nonprofits from the supported list will have the opportunity to add one additional nonprofit of their choice, as long as it is in line with the mission of FTH. (These additions will be minimally screened; our goal is to be as inclusive as possible, while ensuring that nobody is trying to send money to, for example, the NRA.) As usual, creators will also have the option to give the bidder free choice of any group on our list.

There is one important caveat to this “nonprofit of your choosing” policy: after a great deal of discussion, we have decided not to allow donations to specific campaigns. We understand this decision will likely be controversial, and we know it has drawbacks–but we have concluded that it’s the best choice overall, for the following reasons:

1) scale of impact. Over its three years of existence, FTH has raised an average of $25,000 per year. That’s a huge amount by some reckonings, but it’s still pretty small, compared to the budget of a very large organization – or a very large campaign. (You can check out the fourth-quarter fundraising numbers for the democratic presidential candidates here.) We’ve chosen, since 2019, to focus on smaller nonprofits where our donations can make a real difference to the organization. The natural extension of that principle is to rule out really big campaigns, too.

2) pushing back against systemic problems. One of the hardest lessons of the past few years has been that our problem is much bigger than any one person, including the president. The system was broken long before 45 was elected, and the harms of the past three years will resonate into the future no matter who wins the 2020 presidential election. That’s why we’ve chosen to keep focus on organizations that protect immigrants and refugees, offer support to victims of race-based or sexual violence, and engage in community-based work that combats racial hatred.

3) keeping our eyes on the prize. Even if we agree on what the problems are, we’re likely to disagree on which candidate(s) are best suited to start fixing them. In our discussions, we the organizers worried that allowing people to support particular candidates – especially this early in 2020, before most primaries have taken place – would likely foster annoyance and even in-fighting when people began to discover that their favorite creators prefer different candidates.

If you do feel strongly about raising money for a candidate, we are very happy to help you do that! We will gladly share organizational materials with anyone who wants to run another auction (as we’ve done for over a dozen other auction-runners in the past three years), and we will help publicize as well. If you’re interested in running an auction of your own, please drop us an email at fandomtrumpshate at gmail dot com.

And in the meantime, if you feel strongly about focusing on the upcoming elections in your contributions to FTH, we urge you to check out Fair Vote, Higher Heights and Spread the Vote. All three of these election-oriented organizations are on our supported list for 2020.