Christmas Giving

November/December 2008 Issue | Posted by Tom and April Hoopes in Editor's Note

April: If you’re like me, you hate the times when you switch the channel to NPR to hear commercial-free news, and hear a plea for money instead.

You might not mind in this case. This editors’ note is one of those times where you tune in and hear about how much money an organization needs. But we won’t interrupt your normal content, and we suspect quite a few readers will welcome the chance to help in the great work Faith & Family does.

Tom: Catholics tend to be glad to be generous with efforts like Faith & Family magazine and Faith & Family Live! (FaithandFamilyLIVE.com). We are a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization that provides formation in the faith in an affordable way to as many people as we can. Our team hears often from readers who have been helped enormously. We depend on the generosity of those who can give more to help us stay affordable to those who can’t.

To be precise (and Mike Lambert, our development director, told us to be precise), we have a $200,000 yearly shortfall between what we take in from your subscriptions plus advertiser revenue, and what we pay out to writers, designers, artists, photographers, printers, and, above all, postal services.

I suppose in some businesses $200,000 isn’t much. In ours it is. It’s like a new house we have to buy and pay for each year from donations alone.

April: Yes, but that’s not as impossible as it seems. Think of it this way: If we found 200 people (among our tens of thousands of subscribers) who could give us $1,000 each, then we’d be fine.

I couldn’t spare that much. Perhaps you can’t either. So, think of it this way: If we had 20,000 of our subscribers each giving $100 each ($20 a month for five months), we would have enough.

From what Mike tells us, we will have many subscribers willing to give $1,000, but probably not 200 of them. And we’ll have plenty of people willing to give $100, but not 20,000.

What we have to settle for, then, is a good mix of both — and folks who fall somewhere in between.

Tom: So, please join in. April and I will personally pledge to do more than the $100 for Faith & Family, and we ask you to help, too, at whatever level you can. Contact:

Mike Lambert, Development Director

432 Washington Avenue

North Haven, CT 06473

(800) 356-9916 ext. 3805

FaithandFamilyLIVE.com (click “Donate”)

April: Please, also, join us in the prayer we pray every night as part of our family Rosary: “For the National Catholic Register and Faith & Family magazine, that God will bring more and more readers closer to him through them, and bless their staffs.”

Thanks! We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Tom and April Hoopes, Editorial Directors

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