Can You Spare (at least) a Dollar to help diaCRITICS and DVAN?

Do you like reading diaCRITICS? Is it worth $1 to you? Then please read on about how to donate and help keep diaCRITICS and DVAN growing.

When  we at diaCRITICS and our parent organization the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) say that we are nonprofit organizations, we mean it. There’s no profit. Every dollar we’ve ever raised via ticket sales, auctions, and donations has gone to fund our events and projects. That doesn’t mean that money isn’t required to make these events and projects happen, including diaCRITICS.

So now we are asking for your financial help. You can donate as little as $1 and as much as you like. To make it very simple for you, we’ve created two pages:

http://onevietnam.org/dvan  (if you want to donate in general to DVAN)

http://onevietnam.org/vietabroad (if you want to donate specifically to diaCRITICS)

From either page, it’s as easy as shopping online. Click the big blue “Fund this organization” button, enter a dollar amount, and your credit card number. There are even some rewards for donating to DVAN: tickets, t-shirts, books, artwork, and even just some simple publicity and gratitude. If you donate to diaCRITICS, we have escalating levels of gratitude, from a simple public thank you to autographed books to posts dedicated to you to honorary diaCRITIC status. All donations are tax-deductible and done on a “military-grade” security system. Holy cow.

We’ve partnered with onevietnam.org to do this fundraising campaign. Check out their great website. OneVietnam is the brainchild of very energetic young people whose aim is to use social networking to build a collective mass of people to work for Vietnamese interests. You can join the OneVietnam network, too, and meet such people. OneVietnam’s fundraising campaign is designed to help a group of worthwhile community organizations with established track records raise more money and visibility.

A promo video for DVAN. Take a look!

So what are you supporting by giving money to diaCRITICS and DVAN?

In diaCRITICS, you have the leading blog on Vietnamese and diasporic culture and art, with some politics thrown in for spice. We began in 2010, and if you Google us, we appear somewhere in the top 5 hits. We’ve received around 150,000 hits since then, and average over 200 hits a day. We’ve published nearly 300 posts that include essays, interviews, reviews, and news. And we’ve done it all with no pay for writers and no cost to readers, even though this site itself costs money to maintain (and to have designed).

As for DVAN, you can go to its site for a full rundown of what it has done, but here are some of those things: the first Vietnamese film festival in San Francisco, three poetry and literature festivals that drew packed audiences, periodic author readings, the creation of a youth group to promote the arts, and most recently, an art exhibit at UC Riverside that is part of a book on Southeast Asian women’s art and writings from the diaspora. Edited and paid for by DVAN, this book is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press.

There’s a lot of things to pay for with DVAN’s projects. For this month of the fundraising campaign, we are setting a modest goal of $1000 to help pay for the 2nd San Francisco Vietnamese Diasporic Film Festival. The first one last year drew several hundred people to watch a dozen Vietnamese films. The second one will be even better.

Think about it. You can find a dollar in change just by looking around the house. You can downsize from a mega-gigantic mocha latte with whipped cream and three hundred calories to a basic black coffee and spare us three dollars. You can NOT pay $5 to watch “The Watch” on your instant movie channel and give us that money. You’ll learn more from us. Or you can imagine that we’re the really interesting person you’d like to talk to at a bar and spend $10 (okay, $15 in parts of LA) to buy us a drink. That’s all we’re really asking for. Remember to give us the tip, too.

Viet Nguyen, Editor

donate at: onevietnam.org/dvan (for DVAN)

or http://onevietnam.org/vietabroad (for diaCRITICS)