Happy New Year! I hope your year is shaping up to be exactly what you want. I have unending gratitude that you’ve chosen us as one of your primary news sources. I’m also so grateful for the $264,000 you helped us raise in November and December to help us grown our newsroom in 2023.
I’ve got some more exciting news to share. January is our member month. You can become an MFP VIP Club member by agreeing to donate at least $10 a month or $100 a year to our 501(c)(3) to support solutions journalism that holds the powerful accountable.
As part of the membership, you have access to exclusive experiences and conversations with Oscar-nominated Aunjanue Ellis and former U.S. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, who served as Mississippi’s 60th governor. As long as you’re a member, you can watch or listen to every event we’ve put on, which includes talks on narrative nonfiction from our award-winning editor and writer Donna Ladd.
Joining this month means you can kick off the new year with Ellen Morris Prewitt’s talk, “You Are Creative,” later in the month. Ellen is a writing instructor and author who is passionate about helping people find the creative inside you.
Bonus! Our new members will get a one-of-a-kind MFP VIP Club member sticker this month. There’s only one run of these, so join now. If you’re already a VIP Club member and want your sticker, hit reply, and we’ll drop one in the mail.
Your membership at any amount really matters. Our grantmakers and large donors need to see that you have skin in the MFP journalism game. Our board loves a budget that shows we have a steady income that supports our growing newsroom. (You might have seen we’re hiring a new reporter, and Ashton Pittman and Kayode Crown have new roles as news editor and senior reporter, respectively.)
With your recurring gift, we can expand coverage that matters to Mississippians, like Kayode Crown’s story on the unregulated substance Tianeptine sold at gas stations throughout the state. We can’t keep our hospitals open. The last thing we need is something bogging down our health-care system. Your contributions make stories like this possible.
We don’t have deep pockets or a bevy of wealthy backers. I’d love to go for a month without asking for your help. That’s not possible right now. One day it will be. I hope you understand that what we do requires resources.
Every single dollar you give does good work by our fantastic team. Donating $20 a month totals $240 annually, which is nothing to sneeze at. That money makes a significant dent in reporting costs and helps us pay our staff living wages so we can do our part to combat Mississippi’s brain drain.
We’ve had no staff turnover since we launched in March 2020. That’s big in the very competitive nonprofit landscape and a nation where organizations experience continual turnover. We believe in taking care of our stellar team, who are all wonderful people as well as journalism professionals.
Thank you for reading this far and for doing what you can to grow this work.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information azia@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
