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Please Support Your Favorite Catholic Charities This Giving Tuesday!

Today is known in the non-profit world as “Giving Tuesday.” The idea is pretty simple:

GivingTuesday is a global generosity movement unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world on December 3, 2019 and every day.

It was created in 2012 as a simple idea: a day that encourages people to do good. Over the past seven years, this idea has grown into a global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity.

I’ve seen some people contrast Giving Tuesday with the consumerism of Cyber Monday. Instead of spending money on more gadgets, toys, and clothes, people give to their favorite causes in the hopes of making the world a better place.

Today I’m here to encourage you to do the same by asking you to give to your favorite Catholic charities. We hope, through our mission to Rebuild Catholic Culture & Restore Catholic Tradition, we’ve earned the right to be one of them.

This week I received an email from a new reader, who writes, “I am thrilled to have found OnePeterFive. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to you and your writers for the almost unimaginable value you’ve provided to my family and me.”

For so many of our readers, the story is the same. They find tremendous value in the things they learn about the faith here at 1P5, and in our willingness to confront those who would distort it.

And yet, we failed to reach our fundraising goal again last month. We came up nearly $3,000 short. Year over year, donations are down 17%, even though we have not increased our fundraising goals in three years, and have increased the number of paid writers and staff during that time.

To be blunt, our current trajectory is unsustainable in the long term. For us to continue to grow and expand our content offerings, we need more financial resources to work with, not less. We understand that there are many worthwhile causes soliciting your support. We only hope that an independent, reader-supported alternative Catholic media outlet like ours is something you value enough to keep going. Over the past five years, we’ve served nearly 32 million pages of content to readers from all around the globe.

But to date, fewer than 4,500 people have made a financial contribution in support of our work.

Our supporters are our lifeblood, and we cannot thank them enough. They are the reason we exist. They are the reason why we’ve had such an impact on events in the Church since 2014. They are the reason why very few people in the Catholic world in 2019 still ask the following question:

But our current supporters can’t do it alone. 

Yes, our videos can be a bit silly, our humor at times irreverent. We know that we sometimes ruffle feathers – heck, we’ve even been known at times to make some of you angry. (Sorry about that!)

But if we’re sometimes rough around the edges, we hope you know we’re also passionate about Catholicism and the pursuit of God-given truth. We have no strings tied to the bishops or their conferences. We have no large donors demanding that we jump through their hoops. We remain a scrappy underdog in the fight for the soul of the Church and her teachings, spurred on by the prayers and donations of thousands of normal Catholics, just like you, who are simply sick and tired of seeing their concerns dismissed and the faith of their forefathers swept glibly under the rug.

Many of you have ceased giving to your bishops. You’ve pulled donations from various Catholic charitable organizations you no longer trust. If what we do is important to you, please consider re-directing those tax-deductible* funds and making us a beneficiary of your Giving Tuesday support. We’d very much like to finish this month at or above our fundraising goal, so we can face 2020 from a position of strength, not having to figure out where we can cut back.


 

I’ve always said that 1P5 wasn’t so much my idea as God’s prompting, and that if He ever wanted to put an end to it, we’d know. We’re not ready to give up the fight, but you are His instruments. We hope you agree that we have more to accomplish, and join us in our fight.

Whatever you do, whatever you decide, we implore your prayers for our faithfulness to and acceptance of His will as we approach the Nativity of Our Lord.

 

In Christ,

Steve Skojec
Publisher & Executive Director
OnePeterFive

 

* OnePeterFive is a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. All US donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law.

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