Cultural Weekly and the Future of Joy

I read the news today, oh boy.

The crisis worsened. People died needlessly. The White House issued denials.

Then I read about love that was Brilliant Blue. I watched people who Dare to Dance in Public. I discovered art that is magnificent.

Creative work holds vast power to shift our paradigm from fear to pleasure. Creativity brings new perspectives, inspires response and action — these shifts enter through the door of aesthetic pleasure, the emotional response we have to creative work.

Here at Cultural Weekly we need your help to keep providing counterpoint to worldly pain.

Through your readership, social sharing, and especially your donations, you have built Cultural Weekly to what it is. Your support has made it possible for us to publish more than 3,500 articles and poems by more than 650 authors. Cultural Weekly’s content is not available anywhere else!

As you know, we have set up Next Echo Foundation, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, to receive your tax-deductible donations to further our work.

This year, we need $50,000 to keep going. Why so much? Because our website is more than four years old; we need to update it, future-proof it, get it ready to become a mobile app. Otherwise we risk losing the great content we have built over the years. That alone will cost $30,000, which, considering the amount of work we have to do, and the amount of content we have to transport to a new site, is a bargain.

We hope we don’t have to go into continuous fund-raising mode. So may we ask you, please, to consider a regular, monthly pledge of $50, $25, or some other amount? (You know how much you spend on Starbucks!) Just go to https://nextecho.org/donate/, select an amount, and click Monthly at the bottom of the page.

When enough of you do that, we can stop bugging you, and turn our full focus to supporting more creative people and broadening the way we can share their content. Because, really, we need to bring more joy into the world than the news does every day.

 

What are you looking for?