The WisCon Member Assistance Fund provides financial aid for people to attend the con.
Depending on the number of nominations and the amount of donations, the committee will try to help out as many people as possible who would like to come to WisCon but need some support to do so.
The fund is supported by donations, and until midnight February 27 (Central time) longtime WisCon attendee Jed Hartman is multiplying others’ contributions by matching them —
Here’s the deal: For donations made to WisCon’s Member Assistance Fund from now until Saturday night (11:59pm Central Time), i will match every dollar up to $500 — TWICE. So if you donate $5 to WMAF this week, i’ll donate $10. If we all pull together, this could mean another $1,500 to help bring people to WisCon 40 this May.
Also, for every membership donated to the Fund, I’ll donate another one. If you’re interested in donating a membership, please email [email protected].
On Sunday, the SF3 Treasurer and i will tally it all up, i’ll PayPal some monies over to WisCon, and we’ll announce here just how much damage we did to my tax refund.
WisCon 40 takes place May 27-30, 2016.
[Thanks to Will R. for the story.]
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It seems like a good cause; I donated a bit. Hopefully it will help.
I donated to the previous round (a different matching donor). We were talking here the other day about the greying of fandom, with cost being one major factor. This kind of thing is one way to try to mitigate that. It’s not only for young people, of course, but financially less secure people of all ages are going to be less present at cons. So I think this helps increase diversity in a lot of ways.
And ticky *sigh*
Thanks for spreading the word about this fundraising drive! And thank you to all the donors, including Lenore Jones and Cat, who have helped the Member Assistance Fund. My household has also donated during this drive.
Jed Hartman is doing a dollar-for-dollar match up to USD$2500, actually! Here’s the WisCon blog post about it. The post that you quote, the one about a 2-for-1 match going up to $500, is from a previous donor, Wrdnrd, whose challenge did get met earlier this month. They’re both very generous and I’m grateful to both of them.
Wiscon tweeted a few hours ago that the donations had reached $1863.94, and asked someone to give a donation ending in .06.
This brought in string of donations in amounts like $10.09 and $20.14. The current total is $2117.89.
(The time machine has me in 0322, which is before the invention of the dollar; I don’t suppose Wiscon would like a bit of silver jewelry, or half a pound of salt.)