Dear Readers, Supporters and Contributors,
Thank you to all of you who have given this week. I love the page of testimonials that we are getting together - you can read it here. A good number of you have given but preferred to remain anonymous - thank you also!
Please keep giving - you can do so here. We have until February 14th, and I still need 300 new donors.
When I look at the site logs, I can see that beyond our 3 million annual visitors, there are 70,000 or so regular users of the site. People, like you, who come back regularly and read many articles per month. We need a small percentage of the 70,000 to become donors to maintain our independence. Please help us!
I would like to recommend our latest article on Kenya. Angelique Haugerud is an anthropologist who has done fieldwork in Kenya. She shows how everyday citizens live out the experience of violence and division while rebuilding their lives, in doing so offering insight into the ways that mutual assistance and other social bonds can mediate and soften boundaries of ethnicity, clan and class. It reminds me of the much more theoretical piece that we ran this week by the philosopher James Mensch, looking at the roots of the social practices of solidarity.
I am going to New York next week with Anthony Barnett, openDemocracy's founder. We will be visiting the foundations that have been loyal supporters of openDemocracy over the years - the Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers, Rockefeller, Atlantic Philanthropies, the Open Society Institute. I always love being able to tell our Foundation friends how many individual donors have given - if many of you give, even when you don't have to, it is a clear sign that we are producing a particular type of value. So if you are thinking of contributing to our Think Long Term campaign, please give now, so I can report a record number of new donors.
Many thanks,
Tony Curzon Price
