One of my personal takeaways from 2020 was that donating to organizing was more effective than donating to campaigns. In Maine, people flooded Sara Gideon with cash and we got another six years of Susan Collins being very, very concerned; in Georgia, people donated a bunch of money to both Ossoff and Warnock once the runoff started, but I think it was clear that the battle was won by Fair Fight, Stacey Abrams’ organization. The Movement Voter Project is an umbrella organization that raises money to support small, local, progressive groups primarily in key states. (Including, but not limited to, Fair Fight.) I set up a recurring donation to MVP late last year. There are a couple of things about these groups I think are important:

• They’re not just focused on big races like the US Senate but also on downticket races where we absolutely have to build power.
• In addition to registering and motivating voters, they’re groups that will pressure the Democratic party to live up to the progressive values it claims to hold.
• They are run by local people who know a lot better than I do which primaries matter and which candidates have a real chance. They’ll also work to elect the lesser evil, if that’s what’s on the table.
• I generally try to avoid donating to primary races outside my own area (do I know who has the best chance at beating Marjorie Taylor Greene? I do not! You know who might? the Democrats in her district!) but post-primary is often really late to start fundraising for the general election. Funding organizing helps to provide a head start for whoever wins.
• Let’s be honest about this: the Democratic party in some states is run by people who truly do not appear to know their ass from their elbow. I appreciate the opportunity to donate to groups that have some chance of filling the gap in states where the party is incredibly badly run.

Anyway: I created a fundraiser for the Movement Voter Project. I spent a lot of time thinking about what I could do as an incentive for a fundraiser, because the problem with offering stuff like Tuckerizations is that I have to keep track of whether I’ve actually fulfilled my end of the bargain — it’s fine if it’s just a few, but it doesn’t scale well. But! I have an entire box of spiral-bound Mead notebooks from my childhood, containing my creative writing from when I was as young as nine. I was a very enthusiastic writer from a very young age. I was not a particularly good writer. For every $500 raised I will read some of my deeply embarrassing childhood prose for you on video and upload it. The story in this notebook was my fourth grade attempt at a novel about a magical talking horse, if that gives you some idea of what to expect. If people have other ideas of things I could offer, feel free to leave them in the comments.