This Sunday, our team and our supporters will be hitting the virtual pavement to enjoy some Halloween fun and ask folks if they’d skip the tricks and make the treat a donation to Scarleteen.
We’re aiming to raise $10,000 in our annual big ask by 11/5 this year, money we use to create and provide things like:
- the original , progressive and positively influential and sex and relationships education and information content we’ve been making for — and by centering — young people since 1998
- our direct services — our meticulously moderated message boards, chat and mobile text services, all one-one-one free services available to young people and provided by our staff and volunteers, not AI, and not with templates or scripts
- the backbones of our site and the communication tools and frameworks for our staff and volunteers
- support, leadership and a yearly stipend for our fantastic team of international volunteers
- salaries, benefits and the occasional several-day nap for our staff
How can you do this? It’s easy.
You just take (drag the image to your desktop, right-click it, or, if you’re using your phone, just click and hold and then pick your “save image” option) this cute frame here that artist Isabella Rotman made for us.
Then you either take a picture of yourself in this year’s Halloween finery (or, if you’re complete dorks like us, of you and your dog or cat or rat or axolotl in costume) or, if you prefer, a costume from a previous year. Y
Next, you add a little bit of text where you tell folks how important you think the relaxed, inclusive and progressive sex and relationships education we provide is in your own words, and ask them if they’d help keep this amazing independent, queer-led and youth-centered media going with a donation, and you give them this link so they can do that: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/1433116?code=STPRIMARY
Last, you put that on the social media of your choice sometime Sunday. If you want to amplify it and bring it to our attention, too, you can put a #ScareFreeSexEd hashtag on it, our #QueerSexEdForAll hashtag or both. You can also @ us, the hey you of social media.
If you don’t use social or don’t want to for this, no worries: that’s not the only way to ask people for support and get in on the fun. You can also email or text this (or pretend it’s 1979 and get down with the mimeograph machine, I guess), too!
That’s it!
Here’s an example:
This is what it looks like if we do it with an image of me from the end of a fundraising cycle.
(I kid. It’s a photo from the year I did a Shaun of the Dead theme. But I also will not not look like that by the end of this, so am I really kidding? No. Not so much.)
Then zombie-me might post something with it like:
“Hey, friends! If it wasn’t for Scarleteen, not only would my sex education have been scary, super-sexist, transphobic, ableist and otherwise gross, or just plain nonexistent, I would never have learned that it’s okay to eat brains, you need to ask before you eat someone’s brains and then only do it if they really want you to. (I’m still waiting for someone to say yes.) Scarleteen is independent, grassroots media that could really use our support, so if you have the ability, it’d be great if you could make a donation to them with me this Halloween here: https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/1433116?code=STPRIMARY“
Or, you know, something like that.
Stay tuned over the next week or so to our site and our social media. We’ve got some surprises brewing, including a very, very silly treat for donors and anyone who helped promote the fundraiser if we can meet that $10K goal by 11/5. Thanks! We hope to see you on Halloween! Grr. Argh. Brains.