I Really Love Our Growing Democracy Movement, Help Fund Us

By Rabbi Michael Pollack, Executive Director & Co-Founder of MarchOnHarrisburg

We are marching in nine days. While most organizations would be sending frantic emails asking you to donate money for the march, we are doing great.

Our housing, food, transportation, and supplies are almost entirely covered thanks to the work of our 31 person march planning team and contributions from individuals and our movement allies!

We don’t flood your inbox with disingenuous deadlines to pressure you to GIVE NOW!!! We don’t lead with speculative headlines that will happen TOMORROW UNLESS YOU ACT IMMEDIATELY!!!

Our fundraising pitch is a little less gimmicky: We need you to donate to fund our biggest and most constant expense, our two-person staff.

The Work is Ongoing

Our work is ongoing and constant, and our only true deadline is democracy. How fast we get there is dependent on how much time, effort, and resources we all bring to the movement.

Our narrative, our actions, and our goals are not in reaction to divisive and distracting headlines and politicians. We exist because corruption is systemic, we are all suffering because of it, and our society will keep getting worse until and unless we organize, fight, and win the democracy we deserve. We are proactive, we are offensive, and we are too busy advancing forward to constantly worry you with anxious smokescreens from our enemies.

This will be our sixth long distance march. When we arrive in Harrisburg Sunday evening, May 3rd, we will have marched 393 miles in our nine years of marching on Harrisburg. For the march, we are responsible for housing and feeding 50 people for five days, transporting them to and from the march, and equipping them with swag and banners and art. For a typical five-day nonprofit convention, this would cost roughly $78,500 (see my math below), yet we will spend less than $2,000 as MoH. We save $76,500 because we will be housed in churches and homestays organized by local allies. We will be lovingly fed mostly home-cooked meals by a wide variety of volunteers and allied organizations. We organize carpools, our railroad union and climate allies cover train tickets, we screenprint our own shirts, we paint our own banners, and we make our own signs.

We need you to fund our two person staff (me and Andrea) so we can keep putting in 60 hour weeks to build the type of tight-knit, coordinated, and awesome movement that can march 50 people 60 miles over 5 days on less than $2,000. 

Our staff is the glue holding together our 46 team leaders, our 15 working groups, our 10 board members, and our hundreds of active volunteers. We need you to support our staff, and we need to hire more organizers to keep up with our growing volunteer base (please read this letter on our organizational growth plan).

We Need You

We need you to be a recurring donor to sustain this work over-time. 

While we don’t use urgent scare tactics to fundraise, we do the work that we do because the situation is always urgent and catastrophic. Everyday in the US, 800 people die from poverty and 180 people die from the denial of healthcare. Everyday in PA, 1 in 8 children is living in deep poverty and 10% of our people are being hounded by collections over medical debt. This suffering exists because legalized bribery shapes our laws and policies in the pursuit of greed and not for human need. We focus on our structural goals of shifting power from organized money (corruption) to people (democracy). We move quickly with our heads down because we have a tremendous job to do. We are constantly winning and advancing with tenacity, and we need your support to keep moving forward together and not one step back.

For Love and Democracy,

Rabbi Michael Pollack

Executive Director, MarchOnHarrisburg

Ps: Here’s my math from above. My numbers are based off of a few recent nonprofit gatherings I’ve attended, and are also lower than those numbers because everything in Womelsdorf and Lebanon, PA is cheaper than Philadelphia, DC, or Chicago.

Food (Three meals, two snacks, and drinks): $60 X 5 days X 50 marchers = $15,000
Housing: $100 X 5 days X 50 marchers = $25,000

Transportation (A mix of gas, tolls, and train tickets): $150 X 5 days X 50 marchers = $37,500

Swag (t-shirts, stickers, buttons, banners): $20 X 50 marchers = $1,000

Food ($15,000) + Housing ($25,000) + Transportation ($37,500) + Swag ($1,000) = $78,500