The 501(c)(3) Campaign: Go Home with KtB!

[The campaign has ended—read about its stunning success.]

You’ve seen what we’ve done in the last year to bring this decade-old clunker of a website back to its former glory and beyond. We’ve released a new book, hosted a grand old party, published dozens of new writers, and, in the process, multiplied our readership fivefold, with numbers continuing to climb.

Now it’s time to restore our tragically lapsed non-profit status.

With our own 501(c)(3) we’ll have all sorts of great superpowers, like actually existing in the eyes of Uncle Sam, paying annual fees (sigh), giving you the opportunity to receive a tax-deductible receipt when you make a donation, and giving us the opportunity to grovel at the feet of philanthropic foundations — all things we need to keep alive and move forward with all the dangerous new projects we’ve got in store. Week in and week out, we provide you with a steady helping of existential crises for your enjoyment and edification. Now we’re in one of our own.

We need your help.

This process costs money, everything from the legal and filing fees to the odd bit of software, not to mention piles and piles of time. At this point, we don’t have any of it. KtB is a community in the best sense of the word, a collaboration between readers, writers, and editors. Currently we run it on a totally volunteer basis, solely in order to provide a great forum for you. Now we need you to help us kill Buddhas long into the future.

Please dig into your coffers and give whatever you can for our existential struggle with the tax gods. And we’ve got something to give back.

Donations of at least $30 will receive a copy of Marilynne Robinson’s latest novel novel, Home, courtesy of our friends at Picador. (See below!)

Donations of at least $75 will receive Home as well as our latest KtB anthology, Believer, Beware: First-Person Dispatches from the Margins of Faith.

Supplies are limited, so donate now!

Rachel Easterly reviewed Home, the Orange Prize-winning sequel-of-sorts to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, last year on Killing the Buddha. In Easterly’s words:

Home … tells us that our awareness of what hopeful things have transpired in the past can awaken us to the gravity of its sorrow and so motivate us to work to change it. Once we know all people to be the sum of their inherited pasts and their decisions, and once, as Glory says, we can accept our “great sorrow or guilt as absolute,” we might learn forgiveness ourselves, the closest thing to grace, as John Ames says, that we as humans can understand in this life.

It is a marvelous book that at least one of us is reading and loving as we speak—a meditation between doubt and belief, salvation and damnation. All Buddha-killing concerns, to be sure! We’re thrilled to have Robinson’s latest as part of our campaign to get back up on our non-profiteering two feet.

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Please note that our PayPal account, until we can obtain nonprofit status, is sheltered by Small’s Clone Industries, an allied organization under the auspices of KtBnik Nathan Schneider. So don’t be put off by seeing its name on the donation page! Be assured that all gifts will go directly to KtB.

In addition, because we have yet to obtain 501(c)(3) status, we cannot issue tax-deductible receipts at this time. We’re working on it!