Hello! If you are receiving this email, it is because you are a member of one of Raft Foundation’s fiscally-sponsored projects. We send out this bulletin toward the end of every month.

Wow, what a year!

A year ago, Raft Foundation had two fiscally-sponsored projects and had received only $75,000 on their behalf. As 2025 comes to a close, Raft’s sponsored projects number thirty-nine, and we have handled nearly $2M on their behalf. 

On a personal note, having the opportunity to support all of you this year has been a dream come true. Every email, every expense, every check, every contract, is a reminder of all of the great work that you are doing in your communities and for the greater good. It’s my honor to serve, and I’m continually blessed by your trust in me. Happy new year! And let’s keep this momentum going in 2026.

Office closure, end of January to early February

I will be moving across the country from Wednesday, January 28, to Tuesday, February 3, from NYC to the Twin Cities. During this time the Raft “office” will be closed and communication will be highly limited. If anything urgent comes up during that time, please reach me at nathan.74 on Signal. I also encourage and sincerely appreciate you reaching out ahead of time with any anticipated needs or concerns before I am away.

Operational notes

• Member fund: As of December 1, the Member Fund balance sits at $6,862.48. In January we will continue to develop and execute on our first co-budgeting process.

• New projects: Please join us in welcoming Eco-Libre and The Lost Knowledge Project!

• Zoom gatherings: In 2026, we will switch the cadence for our virtual gatherings from monthly to seasonal (i.e., quarterly). The first will be a winter gathering in the new year ~

• Donation form: We have updated https://donate.raft.foundation so that it now points to a dynamic donation form that guides donors through all non-credit-card donation processes and collects required information along the way. 

• Crypto and stock donations: We can now accept donations of crypto and stock! This is through Every.org, a nonprofit platform that deals with the tricky parts of such donations on our behalf. See https://donate.raft.foundation for more information.

• Virtual cards: Need a virtual credit card, or even a physical one? Check out our new Virtual Cards page in the documentation. Many thanks to projects CivicBand and OpenTEAM, who helped us iron out a few wrinkles in the system.

• Semiannual reports: As we continue to iterate on seasonal narrative reports, we are trying a new pattern where Raft drafts a short narrative report and sends it to the projects for their review, semiannually every June and December. Yesterday, we emailed all projects for which we will be requiring a December 2025 semiannual report (excluding new-ish projects) with a draft. Please reply with edits/approval if you have not already!

• Insurance: Our insurance provider is finally starting to catch up with billing, though there are still a few older ones that are missing. When your project’s insurance bill comes through, we will promptly submit an expense in Open Collective for your portion of the cost. Let us know if you have any questions.

• Documentation platform: Wiki.js is unfortunately not meeting our needs; in the new year we will be moving to a new documentation platform, and likely doing away with password protection. More info to come.

• Employee handbook: This is our next focus; no one has been signing up for employment, however, so it has been easy to put it off 🙂

~

Wishing you health and joy in the new year,

Nathan