Your ELi

We couldn’t deliver the diverse and lively content you see in Eli without our MSU student writers. They know things we don’t know, they have connections we don’t have, and they are creative and passionate in their approach to getting a great story.

Today, I’m writing to ask fans of ELi to do two easy things that will help us keep spreading the news and information about East Lansing that we can only get from ELi.

First, though, I want to briefly highlight some of what ELi is doing--and going to be doing--for our community.

This Tuesday, May 5, registered voters in East Lansing can vote on two possible amendments to the City Charter. Last week we provided voters information on the land sale charter amendment. This week we bring you information on the charter amendment regarding marijuana, specifically in terms of what it might mean legally in East Lansing.

Thanks to our donors, Eli is looking forward to a spring and summer filled with stories that educate, inspire and enrich our readers. (We may also infuriate and disturb you; sometimes that comes with the privilege of a free press).

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.

Above: update of our spring fundraising campaign

First, a quick update on our spring fundraising campaign. As you can see from the graph above, we are just about $2500 short of reaching our end-of-March goal of $8000. If we meet that goal, ELi will be funded through the end of June and so we can focus our attention on bringing you critical reporting of the May 5 election (involving two possible charter amendments), progress on developments in town, and the information you need to make your life in East Lansing more informed, more connected, and hopefully better.

ELi's Spring Campaign continues as we aim to raise $8,000 by the end of March to keep ELi operational through the end of June. We have so far raised $4240 towards that goal.

To help explain why ELi needs money to operate, we've developed this informative animation. Thanks to ELi's Board member Stephen Thomas for creating this for the ELi team!

Tibetan Buddhists believe in the tulpa, a creature made entirely by the thoughts and imaginings of a group of people. Through a process of intense, collective focus, an independent, living being is formed.

The mission of Eli is to create an online creature breathed into life and sustained by the varied voices and interests of East Lansing residents. Our passion is to see an Eli filled with articles written by or requested by community members. We envision a resource that grows and changes as our interests shift with seasons and events.

UPDATE: $1,740 raised as of the morning of March 14!

Today we launch our spring fundraising campaign in the hopes of raising $8,000 for ELi by the end of March. The image you see above will be updated as we make progress towards our goal.

If we can do this, ELi will be funded through the end of June. That would allow us to provide you great coverage of East Lansing news through the May election involving two proposed charter amendments, through the end of the MSU and ELPS school years, and into the start of the 2015 summer festival season.

A week from today, ELi officially launches a new fundraising push in the hopes we can raise enough money to keep the organization going through the end of June. So I thought that for “Your ELi” this week, I’d answer a question I sometimes get: Why does ELi need money?

Why does carefully reporting the “who, what, when, where, how, and why” of our City and its people cost money?

Let’s break it down by category.

Here at Eli, we are citizen journalists.

Both Publisher Alice Dreger and I are professional writers, and both of us have extensive experience with collecting, analyzing and breaking down large and complicated amounts of information for the purpose of communicating that data in ways that are clear, honest and useful. Our training has been different from formally schooled journalists—my degree is in law (J.D.), and Alice’s is in history of science (Ph.D.)—but our skill set and experience are a good match for the work of fair and ethical reporting on the community.

When I was growing up, I loved when newspapers would take a question from a reader and find out the answer. Often these reader-submitted questions were ones I had, too, but sometimes they were a question many of us would never have thought to ask—a question that revealed an angle to a story that would have otherwise been missed by citizens.

Image: The front yard of the author and also of ELi's chief reporter for "ELi on Earth"

As we approach the May 5^th election in East Lansing, ELi hopes you will speak up and tell us your positions on the issues that will affect all of us. We will be looking for residents of East Lansing to help educate fellow citizens about their perspectives, and so we hope you will consider contributing in this way.

Ann Nichols’ column this week about Spartan Spirits and other businesses that have been here forever has been bringing historical delights to the ELi mailbag. Among the communications was one letting Ann know that Spartan Spirits used to be a grocery store!