Raising the Money to Run These Campaigns

This past year, NYCC raised almost $200,000 to support our climate and inequality programs. That’s enough money to support our 2 full-time staff devoted to these campaigns; a share of organizers’, researchers’, administrative, development and supervisory staff time; travel and materials costs; and office rent, translation (we use a worker-owned cooperative service for simultaneous English/Spanish translation at our events), phones, internet and other expenses.

About $50,000 per year comes from small, individual donors, mostly over 200 sustaining donors who give by credit card each month. That’s by far the most important source of our funding for climate/inequality work because it’s predictable and unrestricted; we can use all of those funds for political and lobbying work. Chances are, if you are reading this report, you are a donor. Your generous support makes all of this work possible. We also began to develop a large donor program for this work, with five people generously giving $2,500 this year, which is also greatly appreciated. Thank you very much!

We also received almost $150,000 from founda- tions and campaigns that we supported for a mix of work that helped to enable the campaigns described above. We also greatly appreciate those funders, including the Park Foundation, the 11th Hour Project and the NYRenews campaign. We also received generous support from 350.org, whose co-founder Bill McKibben – along with former EPA Regional Administrator Judith Enck – graciously agreed to be our honoree and headliner at our annual fundraising gala. Thank you!

As an organization we spend a lot of time raising money, but it’s time well spent – and it enables us to crank out strong campaigns and organizing work. This coming year, we will try to raise $300,000, which would allow us to devote even more staff and organizing time to these efforts. Right now, we’re involved in six campaigns in which we play a major role, so it’s quite busy. We’re feeling a little stretched. Another staffer devoted to this work would enable to recruit more new NYCC members from Black and LatinX communities specifically on fighting climate change and inequality, which would also help build up NYCC’s base of involved activists and members on all our campaigns.

The Intercept “First Sandy, then Maria. A Mother and Daughter Marked by Both Storms Find Hope in Climate Activism,” which profiled NYCC board member Rachel Rivera.

WNYC, Sludge and Capital & Main “New York Pension Fund Chief Cashes in on Natural Gas,” which exposes Comptroller DiNapoli’s former CIO’s conflict. While the story does not directly quote NYCC, it reports on the formal corruption complaint we crafted with 350.org.

The Huffington Post “New York City Just Unveiled A Historic Bill To Cut Its Biggest Source Of Climate Pollution,” and The Nation “New York Has a Plan to Tackle Some of Its Worst Carbon Polluters,” which put the #GreenNewDeal4NYC legislation to clean up #DirtyBuildings in context as a first-of-its-kind effort worldwide.

WAMC “Report Takes Issue With Plans For Danskammer Power Plant,” covered the release of our report documenting the Trump-supporting Wall Street financiers pushing the large new proposed Danskammer fracked gas power plant.

And this video 350.org produced after the April 23rd #CuomoWalkTheTalk march and rally of 1,500 activists in Albany is just super.