Do you want to make the world a better place? Of course you do.
Laughter can be the best medicine.
Do you think we can make the world a better place by becoming more informed about the rest of the world, by getting outraged about global poverty and injustice, by holding the powerful to account or even by laughing a little – by poking fun at our humanitarian selves?
We do, and if you do as well we are asking for your support in the fight against an impoverished news narrative. Humanosphere is an independent and increasingly influential nonprofit news organization that offers daily reports, cutting-edge analysis, expert perspective, irreverent humor and sometimes just something goofy to help you stay on top of what’s happening in the fight against poverty and inequity.
Here’s one way you can help, by clicking this button and donating through PayPal.
We have other ways you can help as well:
- Use our new text-pledge function – aka, sending money through your phone. Cool! Talk about cutting edge!
- Put us in touch with like-minded folks in the philanthropy and corporate social responsibility sector to help us secure grants, donations for operations. We are so very non-profit the IRS only took a few months to grant us 501c3 status (which may be a new land-speed record for a news organization).
This post is a pitch for your money. But fundamentally, it’s a pitch to ask you to help us change the brutal reality of a world where tens of millions of children today still go to bed hungry, where mundane and easily preventable diseases still kill hundreds of millions of people and billions don’t have clean drinking water or a pot to poop in. That’s absurd! It should be front-page news every day. But it’s not – except here on Humanosphere.
Powerful people agree with us. When politicians started attacking the under-funded public health community for its handling of Ebola, we asked one of the world’s leading disease warriors, Bill Foege, for his take on the idiocy. When World Bank President Jim Yong Kim came to Seattle, the only journalist he talked to was Humanosphere’s editor Tom Paulson. When renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs came under attack for failing to end global poverty, Humanosphere dug in to the shrill debate. When swashbuckling journalist-adventurer Robert Young Pelton announced he was going to go find African warlord Joseph Kony, we asked Pelton why this was not ridiculous (and got a pretty good answer).
When the UN reported evidence that Rwanda was supporting violent militias in neighboring DR Congo, Tom Murphy scrutinized how the philanthropist Howard Buffett sought to undermine the UN finding.
Is it foreign aid or covert aid?
Humanosphere was one of the first organizations to warn, in 2011, that the CIA’s ill-advised fake vaccine scheme in Pakistan would endanger and undermine the polio vaccination efforts there – not to mention aid work in general.
We could go on patting ourselves on the back, which is a standard routine for fund-raising. But self-promotion is dangerous and can become pathological, a phenomenon we report on regularly and hope to avoid. We are simply trying to make the case for your financial support to continue and grow in influence.
Here’s the basic info we hope will prompt you to donate to Humanosphere:
- Humanosphere, originally launched in 2010 as an NPR project at Seattle affiliate KPLU, in 2013 converted to an independent non-profit news site recognized as a charitable organization by the Washington Secretary of State and the IRS, as a 501(c)3 organization.
- The website has been ranked as one of the top ten ‘most influential’ online news resources by the U.S. Agency for International Development.
- More than a third of our regular readers are not based in the United States, evidence that Humanosphere is clearly engaged in a global dialogue.
- The Seattle International Foundation, one of our primary financial supporters, selected Humanosphere (among literally hundreds of other non-profit organizations) for inclusion in its 2014 Global Giving Guide.
- The team: Tom Paulson, founder and editor at Humanosphere, was previously medical and science reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and has written for numerous other publications. Tom Murphy is Humanosphere’s East Coast correspondent and has written for other publications such as The Guardian and The Atlantic.
You can help strengthen Humanosphere’s voice on these issues that matter to you. Please support our work aimed at making the world a better place through improved news coverage and informed dialogue. All donations are tax-deductible and can be made through PayPal or by mailing a check to:
Humanosphere
600 North 36th Street, Suite 200
Seattle, WA 98103
Suggested levels of support
Humanosphere is a non-profit, tax-deductible corporation registered in Washington state. All donations will be very gratefully acknowledged. For more information, please contact editor/publisher/janitor Tom Paulson at tom@humanosphere.org.
