Caracas, May 14, 2022 (OrinocoTribune.com)—This Wednesday, May 11, the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ) and Orinoco Tribune signed an agreement, making Orinoco Tribune a Fiscal Sponsorship Project, approved unanimously by the AfGJ board. This agreement will allow the Venezuelan news outlet to reduce the risk of relying on corporate crowdfunding platforms like PayPal or Patreon and paying high fees for using those services.
Orinoco Tribune, like many independent news outlets that are 100% reader-funded, opted in recent years to use corporate crowdfunding platforms to keep its operations alive. Media outlets without financial presence in the US also use these services due to the limitation of other platforms to deal with international transactions, not to mention those based in illegally sanctioned or blockaded countries like Venezuela.
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In addition to the complexities of finding the right crowdfunding or donation platform, in recent years, sanctions and corporate censorship have also raised concerns about the credibility of many of those platforms, such as PayPal, Patreon, Stripe, YouTube, among others. Such actions have forced many independent journalists and news outlets to look for alternatives. In this context Orinoco Tribune contacted the renowned human rights organization AfGJ, based in the United States, to explore the possibility of using their fiscal sponsorship program.
AFGJ’s fiscal sponsorship program allows all donors or patrons to carry out tax-deductible donations because of AfGJ’s 501(c)(3) status as a non-profit organization. Also, we know that the fee that AfGJ charges, which is competitive taking into consideration all the services they provide, will go to finance social justice and anti-imperialist programs, as they have been doing for more than 20 years, and that we have witnessed.
For Orinoco Tribune this agreement with the Alliance for Global Justice is a triple-win relationship because they will charge us a smaller fee than the very expensive fee that Patreon charges us (around 13-14%); that charge will go to the same causes that we defend in Orinoco Tribune; and our patrons and donors will have the benefit of full tax-deductible donations (if they choose to switch from PayPal and Patreon), and Orinoco Tribune might see an increase in donations that is currently much needed.
We invite our readers and supporters to consider switching from Patreon to our new donation/crowdfunding option with the AfGJ if they wish, taking into consideration all the benefits mentioned above. Moreover, the AfGJ fiscal sponsorship program allows recurrent donation options (like Patreon), as well as payments by checks. Finally, AfGJ provides is a commendable organization run by an amazing team of socialist-minded people committed to building a better and more just world, inspired by the late Chuck Kaufman.
We invite you all to visit our new page for the AfGJ fiscal sponsorship donations, and we hope all our readers will help us spread this amazing news, and help us strengthen our funding base, severely affected in recent months due the many complexities of world economy affecting all of us everywhere in the world, but more severely in Global South countries, especially those like Venezuela that are subjected to illegal and criminal US, Canadian, and European sanctions and blockades.
Featured image: Photo composition with AfGJ’s logo (left) and Orinoco Tribune’s logo (right). Photo: Orinoco Tribune.
Special for Orinoco Tribune by staff
OT/JRE/SC/SL
