I’m here to answer all your burning questions about becoming an Establishment member.
Hey, Ijeoma here. I’m sure you’ve seen a couple (hundred) posts from The Establishment encouraging you to become a member. Now, you may be asking yourself, “What is an Establishment membership?” or “Why should I join?” or “Why do you keep bugging me about it?” or “Who are you?” If this is you, then allow me to tell you all that you need to know about The Establishment Member Community.
What Is It? It’s basically a cool club you can join here at The Establishment for as little as $5 a month. Think of every club you ever wanted to join as a kid, double it, add sparkles, and then you have a membership with The Establishment.
What Do I Get As A Member? You get exclusive content created by amazing writers — LIKE ME (and some other people), you get to ask me questions about life in my upcoming members-only advice column (WUT), and you get to join our loving, lively, and engaging chat community on Slack. WE EVEN HAVE A BOOK CLUB, NERDS.
Why Do You Keep Bugging Me About It? Because we need members! Look, it’s never sexy to talk about money (okay, not true, it’s often very sexy to talk about money), but the truth is — in order to exist in this space as a voice of resistance and pay our staff and writers for the amazing work they do — we need funds. We will always need funds (unless one of you wants to give us A LOT of money and then we will stop asking for a while) and in our search for sustainable and ethical revenue (which included 20 weeks of intense research and discussion in the Matter accelerator program), we’ve decided that paid membership is the best way forward. It allows us to continue to produce widely accessible free quality content, while providing extra paid quality content to those who can afford to help support our work, at a very reasonable support level. All while maintaining our pledge to *actually* pay writers (if you’re a freelancer, you’ll recognize that this is more novel of a concept than it should be).
WE EVEN HAVE A BOOK CLUB, NERDS.
Why Should I Join? You should join because you value the amazing work that we are able to publish here at The Establishment. You should join because few publications so consistently support high-quality work from marginalized voices, and pay for that work. You should join because we do our upmost to ensure that when you read one of our thought-provoking articles, you aren’t going to be suddenly smacked in the head with the racism, misogyny, ableism, classism, transphobia, and other bigotries that often make their way into mainstream writing — marginalizing all but the most privileged audiences. You should join because part of economic justice means paying for the labor of others when that labor benefits us. You should join because the bonuses are fun and cool. You should join because in a time when so much of our media aims to shock or entertain, but not inform — we often do all three with clarity, ethics, and — yes, goddamnit — panache.
If you love The Establishment, and you want MORE of The Establishment — or if you love us just the way we are and you want us to be able to keep doing just what we’re doing, I hope you’ll become a member of The Establishment today.
Thank you for your support,
Ijeoma
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