Purple (A Legacy Site)

Our fiscal sponsorship of the We Want the Land Coalition formally ended on December 31, 2017, and tidying up the straggling issues and accounting took until the summer of 2018. We are so proud of our sisters in WWTLC and of our work together to secure The Land for the benefit of women and girls. We encourage you all to follow WWTLC on their website, wwtlc.org, and their Facebook pages, We Want the Land Coalition and the closed group We Want the Land Community, and to continue to support their project.

But now we are embarking on two initiatives of our own, one renewed and one new:

• First, we are preparing to actively solicit proposals from local and regional womyn imagining or already working on other nonprofit initiatives to further the well-being of lesbians, womyn and our community itself. We are open to addressing a wide range of concerns under that description: education, culture, health, civil rights and more fit under our umbrella. The relationship between Purple and a candidate project would be determined by the nature of the project and the needs of both Purple and the participants. It could range from Purple’s adopting an initiative as its own, staffed by the womyn who proposed it, to a formal fiscal sponsorship.
  
  As we increase our outreach to members of the Lansing area lesbian/womyn’s community whose projects might benefit from sheltering under Purple’s umbrella, we are especially interested in fostering initiatives by and for members who are under-represented and under-resourced: womyn of color, young womyn, differently-abled womyn, low-income womyn, and others.
  
  Our Request for Consideration form is available here.
  
  
• We are also doing the preliminary work toward setting up The Lesbian Legacies Endowment: Womyn’s Cultural/Political Activism in Second Wave Feminism. This fund will support, build and make accessible an impressive range of lesbian and womyn’s materials held by The Michigan State University Libraries Special Collections, notably including the archives of both the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and Goldenrod Music, a national women’s music distributor based in Lansing. This wonderful trove of lesbian and womyn’s heritage is available for research by scholars and ordinary citizens, but researchers have to come to the Special Collections reading room during open hours.
  
  We hope to promote the use of this collection to increase the recognition and the impact of the work of lesbian feminists in the last half-century. We especially hope that young womyn will be able to find and build on our heritage. Therefore, we are creating this endowment, primarily to open opportunities for researchers to come and use the collections for research, activism, and artistic activities.
  
  It is possible already to donate to this fund, but we expect to launch our fundraising campaign in earnest in the spring of 2020.

Look for our open house on September 28 to meet the womyn on the Purple Board and to hear more about what we hope to do, how you can help, and how your project might fit under Purple’s umbrella.

The Autumn Appeal is picking up speed as WWTLC board members increase Facebook postings and other outreach. The fund hit $35,046 on Nov. 5–only $365K to go by New Year’s Eve!

The President of the WWTLC Board, Leslie Gallagher, put up a great video here explaining why WWTLC needs the $400K goal for its 2018 budget:

• land contract payment, taxes, and insurance, totaling approximately $204K
• hiring desperately needed full-time staff, 2½ positions for between $150K-$175K
• operating expenses, $25K
• improvements, especially for accessibility, to the Land itself.

And the WWTLC Board released informational materials and an online application for organizers of potential gatherings and events during Summer 2018.

So, stay tuned–the Amazons are rising!

Today, WWTLC has launched the first of what will be an ongoing series of fundraisers in support of the Land and the effort to make it available for the benefit of women and girls in perpetuity.

The goal of this first Annual AUTUMN APPEAL is to raise an operating budget of $400,000 for WWTLC’s next fiscal year. Specifically, they are raising funds to

• meet their first land contract payment in April 2018;
• begin investment in infrastructure improvements that will ensure better accessibility on the Land for all women within our community; and
• hire dedicated staff to run and steward WWTLC.

These are just the first few steps toward fulfilling WWTLC’s mission to provide women and girls with a permanent venue for unique programs, events, and experiences that celebrate women’s history, promote women’s healing and empowerment, build women’s community, and encourage feminist education and growth.

We at Purple are so proud of our sisters in WWTLC and of our community at large for our rather grand achievements in this first year. We hope you will join us in supporting this historic effort.

Get all the background information and current updates at wwtlc.org and by joining the WWTLC Community page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WWTLC.community).
Then, please DONATE through wwtlc.org/donate.

We actually can’t keep up everywhere with the haps. As of Thurs. 4/6/17 11am DST we’re at $354,594.85 and climbing. See the WWTLC Facebook page for latest details. Go Team Ferns!

We have done so well, Amazons of the Ferns! The total raised as of 3/29/17 to purchase the Land is $306,589.29! In only four months!

But time is short. The fund has enough to cover the down payment of $300K, but we still need another $55,000 before April 17 to cover the expense of owning and maintaining the property. We cannot proceed to sign the contract–and secure the Land!–without enough funds to pay insurance, property taxes and the like.

We’re calling on Amazon Nation to keep rising–and bring all our sisters with you!

For the latest information on how you can donate, see WWTLC’s Donate page. And for all the latest news, ask to join WWTLC’s Facebook page.