SISTORIES Sustainability Fundraiser
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Won’t You Celebrate With Us! Help us honor 4 years of southern Black feminist storysharing by contributing to our 2024 Sustainability Fundraiser.
SISTORIES began as an interactive Black feminist literary magazine designed to explore sites of recovery and resistance in southern Black women's stories. We released our debut issue and hosted our first storysharing workshop on February 29th, 2020, honoring the transition from Black History into Women's History.
Since then we've grown into an award-winning indie publishing and production organization, sharing Black feminist stories from across the south, hosting virtual workshops that nurture and support the creative and holistic wellbeing of Black women, femmes, and gender-expansive folks, and equitably paying all our contributors, facilitators, and editors.
- We’ve published 65 southern Black femme, woman, and gender-expansive artists and storysharers in our four print and digital issues.
- Paid out over $14,000 in honorariums to southern Black femme, woman, and gender-expansive contributors and facilitators.
- Distributed over 400 FREE copies of our interactive Black feminist literary magazine.
- Hosted numerous FREE virtual community storysharing programming in partnership with local organizations.
- Sponsored the very first Southern Black Writers Conference.
And our work to bring our community into the liberatory tradition of Black feminist storysharing has only become more urgent.
Sustaining Our Vision
We've been able to fund our operations through prayer, community, luck, and consistently pursuing aligned grant opportunities.
Against the odds of a highly competitive grant field, where fledgling, grassroots, southern-based, Black women-led and serving organizations like ours face significant and routine underinvestment, we’ve proven our ability to secure financial backing, raising over $200,000 in grants for the development, production, and distribution of our literary magazine and corresponding community workshops.
However, our small team is still working on a part-time and volunteer basis, and for where we’re trying to take southern Black feminist storysharing thhis year and beyond, well that's just not going to cut it. So we're asking for your support.
We need to raise $20,000 in order to sustain our work and growth.
With your support, we will be able to:
- Increase our organizational capacity, aiding our ability to secure resources that'll allow our founding director/chief-editor too come on full-time,
- Expand our public programs to host our first fellowship four young queer writers,
- Increase the distribution of our print publication in feminist and Black owned bookstores and partners across the south,
- Begin planning our first SISTORIES storysharing retreat
We know sharing our stories helps us heal from the harm white oppressive systems has caused to our bodies, minds, spirits, and communities. We know that all Black women and femmes and gender-expansive folks have stories that deserve to be shared and thoughtfully engaged in community, and we need your help to keep creating spaces that nurture, support, and celebrate Black women and femmes and gender-expansive storysharers.
Thank you in advance for showing up with us. <3
Organizer
Ashley Nickens
Organizer
Charlotte, NC