January/February 1999 Issue

Cause Celeb

Can star power create social change?

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Celeb: Natalie Merchant, adult contemporary singer

Cause: Jamestown, N.Y., Boys and Girls Club

What she’s done: Monetary donations and personal appearances

What celeb gets: A chance to give back to her own hometown

What cause gets: Money for teen pregnancy prevention and academic assistance programs; a chance to let potentially bored and troubled kids meet a local girl made good.

Connection between celeb and cause: Unlike most celebrities and their causes, Merchant has an organic connection with Jamestown Boys and Girls Club: She was a child member of the Jamestown Girls Club (before it merged with the Boys Club), says the club’s executive director, Judy Moore.

Chance celeb will humiliate cause: Merchant’s earnest singing persona fits snugly with the club’s approach to life’s travails. She’s not apt to let them down.

What good came of this? Neither Merchant’s publicists nor Moore will reveal the precise amount of her donations (Merchant’s publicists don’t want it to be seen as a publicity ploy), but Moore said it was enough to hire a new counselor. In 1997, Jamestown made news as the place where one man allegedly infected nearly a dozen local teen girls with HIV. Only time will tell if another counselor can prevent a similar incident.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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