Facebook Publication Date: 7/29/2018 23:07

Hey Beloved Community:

Talking Turkey.

We are doing something new in addition to the (Not So) Weekly Ask.

We drafted and did an actual advertisement. It is mostly going out to you all (we were fairly surgical in our targeting), and we do ask you to respond to it.

We are going to more or less set it and forget it; we will change up the graphics and the language, but you will definitely see them in your feed going forward.

We are pretty much paying Facebook for every set of eyeballs through boosted posts anyway. So this is not such a stretch.

What it will do is, hopefully, allow ourselves to focus on other, what we feel are crucial tasks, like the new series on communication and community, and setting up the new series on Trauma and the ACE.

It will also allow Lace to write freely, without regard over page clicks and individual responses to a given post, or aggregated content, or article.

This is true: Lace keeps this space constantly top of her mind. But this is also true: she needs to put you out of her mind to write in the most candid, independent, and unfettered way possible.

This is why it is important to decouple content from Ask. And why it is crucial, beloved community, that you do not ignore the Ask. In the six months together, it has not gotten any easier to do (Lace will never get used to it); but it has gotten easier for you all to ignore. Very candidly put, this must change.

The last two months have not been sustainable, even as we have received and been grateful for increased page views and engagement.

So then, a semi-automated ask. I hope when it comes across your feed, as it probably will, you will not scrunch up with exasperation that we are asking yet again, because not asking does not work. We also ask that you do not heart or like. We need to see accurate responses. Hearts and likes absent actual response skews the results.

If you feel led to contribute to the community in advance of the ad, please do. It will allow us to start this next month strong, and make it easier and less stressful to plan and provide content, commentary and engagement. We would much rather engage with you than worry about you.

As well, in the coming weeks and months, look for very particular engagements with each of you. By now there are almost 4000 of you, 300 of you picked up this week alone. We will be putting out a recruitment for some of you to work with us to share the happy tasks of the running of Lace on Race. If you are interested in being part of the team that makes this place run (or skip, or limp, or canter) be sure to respond when we put out the call. When things blow up, as this has in this short a time, we need many hands.

This community can become sustainable, and we can continue to serve you with content we are proud of, and a community worth abiding with. But we need your partnership, in comments, shares, and yes, with your resources.

In any given week, for sustainability and to make this free-but-we-ask-you model work, we need no fewer than 25 of you to respond, either to a request you see, or in advance of a request. This needs to be something that is reliable and that can be counted upon as we make projections going forward. We have given you what we feel has been, and will continue to be, our very best. We need you to help us to do to that with confidence.

To make this possible, we are moving towards individual engagement, with a personal note from us, as well as an ask for increased numbers of sustainers–which I sort of have done right now! We need you to keep us top of mind as well, even as we serve you with our all.

Sustainers are the truly the glue that holds Lace on Race together, allowing us to plan with confidence–for the website, for getting focused on the upcoming midterm elections, for developing materials and the like. For using our numbers and our increasing influence and platform to leverage real change that will be felt far beyond us.

For this we need you. We have come far beyond what any of us imagined when we formed this place six short months ago. We are grateful for every eyeball, every discussion, every place we have wrestled together and grown together.

We want to be here for the long haul. So we need you to respond to our very modest call. So do not skip past, or sigh when you see our sponsored posts.

Freedom ain’t free. Liberation, as we have seen, comes with small but real sacrificial acts, which, taken together, can indeed change our landscape.

Thanks for walking with us. And thank you for the curiosity, the vision, and the resilient reliability necessary to keep this place doing work no one else is doing, in the way only we can.

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