Legit sorry to be sending so many emails, but I wanted to say a giant, humongous, torrential THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to this effort so far, whether through your time volunteering, your attention to the cause, or your monetary contribution.
Today (12/31) is the FINAL DAY of our match campaign for Save ESNP. We are $4,600 away from our goal of $10,000.
Any contributions made right now up to $10,000 are doubled - that means we could reach $20,000 in donations!
https://www.saveesnp.org/donate
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Why does this effort need funds? Well, what started as a petition has evolved into an all-volunteer, community-led nonprofit. We've seen what happens when citizens "trust the process" (with Plan Hamilton and East Chattanooga Rising, among others), and we realize that we need to pool real resources together as a community to fight the County's/City's plan. The County is currently using taxpayer money to survey, plan, and design industrialization options on our public parkland. It's time to put some teeth on our own people-powered effort.
Our two big goals right now are to (1) SPREAD AWARENESS, and (2) BUILD A ROBUST FOUNDATION of research, information, and reporting to stand in the way of any attempt to rationalize the removal of PERMANENT park protections.
So where exactly do the funds we raise go? Here's our short list of priorities:
- education, advertising, and outreach (printing of flyers/infosheets, yard signs, billboards, paid access to public records that have paywalls, website)
- events and programs (materials for tabling events, parades, t-shirts for volunteers, supplies for forthcoming children's program)
- environmental and economic impact studies (contracts for professional wildlife biologists, economists, University research)
- legal support
Every dollar counts, and for one more day, every dollar is two dollars.
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Thank you again and again for being a part of this giant community effort.
-Melissa
***Donate via our site, not the Change.org platform!***