YOUR ELi: Take the Money and Run

Note: No bagels were injured in the course of ELi's spring fundraising campaign.

A huge thank you goes out to everyone who donated to ELi during our spring fundraising campaign! Our goal was to raise $8,000, and thanks to the generosity of our donors, we raised $8,535. Given this, ELi is now fully funded through the end of June.

And now, ELi is going on Spring Break! Hence the title of this article, No, we are not taking the website to the Caribbean or anything like that. We will just be quiet—barring local major disasters—for the next week. The public schools are closed this week, City Council isn’t meeting because of "lack of business," and our Managing Editor Ann Nichols and I are pretty pooped from running ELi non-stop, every day, since our last break in December.

Before we went on break this week, I had hoped to have a story up on the “bagel riot” at Cedar Village last Sunday, after MSU won the game, but I got my questions in rather late to the East Lansing Police Department. So I haven’t heard back in time to do it before our break. I want you to know, I did ask the ELPD the questions I believe our readers would have wanted me to ask: How are bagels classified in the law in terms of weaponry? Did the Police use any special techniques to disperse the crowd – perhaps offering them cream cheese?

And I had already managed to get a balanced set of comments on the story. One faculty member in MSU’s College of Human Medicine was going to be on the record noting that, given these were Midwestern bagels—and so much squishier than “real” bagels—no one could possibly have gotten hurt. A colleague of his was ready to counter that Bruegger’s Bagels in downtown East Lansing are about as good as the bagels he gets in New York while visiting his in-laws, and so somebody might have gotten some salt in their eyes, assuming they were salt bagels or "everything" bagels.

Alas, sometimes stories just don’t come together.

What has come together is ELi. Since we really got going in September, 2014, we have published 344 articles from 43 different citizen-reporters. We have shot up and up in readership and local reputation. And we are meeting our stated nonprofit mission:

(a) to enhance and improve the sharing of local information among members of the greater East Lansing, Michigan, area primarily through a moderated local online newspaper that is open and free to all visitors, at eastlansinginfo.org;

(b) to promote communication among members of the greater East Lansing, Michigan, community, including across generations, across neighborhoods, and between permanent and temporary residents of our community;

(c) to support local educational institutions, including the East Lansing Public Schools and Michigan State University, including by providing paid and mentored opportunities for students to become reporters of local news and information.

Now that we have a clear base of articles, reporters (including student reporters), and local individual donors, we can start to go for foundation grants. That means we can grow ELi to be even better for you.

If you haven’t donated yet, it’s not too late! Your support will help us get foundation grants and to put off the next fundraising push, allowing us to focus on what matters—bringing you news of the people, by the people, and for the people of East Lansing. You can easily donate online with a credit card, or mail a check (payable to East Lansing Info at PO Box 115, East Lansing, MI 48826). All donations are tax deductible. Please also consider using this link to become an automatic monthly supporter at the $5 or $10 rate! Monthly donors help us have a predictable economic base, and right now, we only have a handful of automatic monthly donors.

Thank you to everyone, for reading ELi, for being our reporters, and for supporting us financially. And my personal thanks especially to my fellow members of ELi's Board of Directors--Vic Loomis, Mike Lawrence, and Stephen Thomas--and to our amazing Managing Editor, Ann Nichols. It is a pleasure to work with such a great team.

We’ll be back next Sunday, April 12.