Supporting Canadian Atheist

For a long time, people have been asking how they can help support Canadian Atheist. Well, now we have options.

Canadian Atheist

Before getting into any details, I want to stress that Canadian Atheist is not a money-making venture. No one is going to be getting rich off of CA. Canadian Atheist is also not a source of income for anyone. No-one is making a living off of CA; all our contributors and I – the managing editor – are volunteers.

But of course, there are costs to running Canadian Atheist, and the managing editors – myself and those before – have borne those costs for years. I will continue to do so. However….

Several people have wanted to help support Canadian Atheist, but there’s really been no way to do so. We don’t collect membership fees (we don’t have “membership” of any kind); we are not a registered charity so we cannot accept donations. And I couldn’t in good conscience simply say, “just send me cash” – not without some way to be accountable for any cash people send.

Now that we have Canadian Atheist meta, I have a way to show you just how much CA costs to run, and exactly what the money is being spent on. As you can see, it’s not that much money, especially since I spent the last year working to cut the costs – it used to cost around $280/year… I’ve cut that down to around $90/year (mostly paid triennially), not only without losing anything, but actually gaining features. It ain’t that much, which is why it’s not a problem for me to keep carrying it.

But it occurred to me that if people really want to help out, that would not only be awesome – I would love it if I could get CA to the point that when I eventually pass it on to the next managing editor, it will be self-sufficient – it could open up possibilities to do more. It’s impossible to say exactly what that “more” could be now – not without even having a sense of how much support we’d be getting – but ideas include Canadian Atheist swag (shirts, hats, mugs, etc.), and maybe even financing conferences. Check out our prospectus for a sense of how we might spend our cash.

I want to make it clear that Canadian Atheist is not “begging for money”. We don’t really need it (seriously, I can manage $90 a year, folks), and there are a lot of Canadian atheists out there writing blogs or making podcasts who can really use some extra support. But if you really like CA and want to help us out a little, the financial reports will show you how we’ve spent our money, and the prospectus will show you how we will spend in the future, so everything will be open and transparent.

As for how you can support Canadian Atheist, the meta site has information about that. As a summary, CA has a Liberapay account and a Patreon account. (Note: please be cautious with Patreon. There are a lot of people identifying as “Canadian Atheist”.) You can choose whichever platform you are most comfortable with – Liberapay is much simpler, but Patreon is a lot more popular.

Please keep in mind that we are not looking to be making large amounts of money here. $25 or $50 a month is just way too much; a couple bucks a month is plenty. (If you can afford $25 a month, there are plenty of other worthy content creators out there who could use a boost.)

We’re really talking small numbers here. If we could get $2 a month from around 20 people, that would be insane; we could completely cover our costs, pay off our debts in a year or two, and finance some really sweet projects. But even $2/month is more than I’d ask from people. Heck, right now we have single patron offering 20¢ a week! 😂 And that’s just awesome!

I am not keen on the idea of accepting large sums of money. If you would like to offer (as has been done in the past, for example) $50, I’d much prefer if you did, say, $2/month for 2 years. Liberapay makes this easy, and it’s probably not hard on Patreon either.

And finally, if you do not want to support Canadian Atheist financially – either because you can’t afford to or simply don’t think it’s worth it – that’s perfectly fine. All our content will always be free for everyone – we will never have paywalls or “patron-only content”. If you want to support us in other ways, you can share our stuff, point potential readers our way, or maybe even contribute an article or piece of media or artwork yourself! (Actually, if you do art, music, or video, I would love to feature works by Canadian atheists!)

Thanks in advance to all our supporters, whether financially or otherwise!