Hello,

This is Mel.

I'm one of the co-founders of Triangle Blog Blog, an all-volunteer civics news collective. (Seriously. I work on this every night after my kids go to bed. Sometimes I regret naming it the silliest thing in the world.)

Despite the name, we are very serious about providing context about issues of local and national concern for our community. We combine humor with facts and easy-to-understand guides to help people better understand civics -- and get more involved in the process.

We've had some big wins over the past 2.5 years. We:

• Created an election guide that helped increase turnout by A LOT in our local 2023 municipal election.
• Covered dozens of town council, school board, and advisory board meetings in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, providing context and detail.
• Raised $12,000 for PORCH Chapel Hill-Carrboro in five days.
• Broken news that’s been picked up both locally and nationally. 
• Brought attention to historical wrongs that have largely gone unreported.

We recently updated our about page so that it's easier to find out what we're all about.

I want to share what we plan to do in the forthcoming 2024 election cycle and ask for your help. 

Our plan right now is to:

- Publish interviews with Democrats running for elected office across the state and our community.
- Publish an issue tracker that helps people clearly differentiate candidates and where they stand on issues across North Carolina.
- Make it super easy to understand what each position on Council of State does and why they're important. (These are the statewide offices like State Auditor and Superintendent of Public Schools.) We'll be starting a "2 week boot camp" to learn about these roles later this fall.

We need to hire a web developer to help us with this effort and we need funding to print our guides. We know that what we do works - we have data showing that our previous efforts translate into voter turnout.

We rarely ask for money - we've only done it twice, and we could probably do a better job at this! But we're asking today: Please consider donating to help the blogblog continue and expand our work this election cycle.