wickedgrounds
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An update and WOW on our emergency fundraiser
🕑 Added 2024-01-19 17:22:45 +0000 UTCGood morning!
I know some of you are following this closely since I first reached out yesterday, and others are just catching up. If this is your first time seeing this, you might want to read yesterday's post!
Since this time yesterday morning, 59 kinksters like you have helped Wicked Grounds raise over $8,500 toward retiring the worst and scariest of our old cafe debt. As you can learn more below this update, this particular creditor is threatening our continued operations (despite our honoring every part of our agreements with them), and we just need to get this one off our back.
Contribute to our GoFundMe to retire this debt!
As I write this, we have about $3K more to go to get this particular debt retired. Then, we'll be applying the next $6K or so toward un-fucking several payments that are currently delayed or otherwise screwed up due to this ongoing mess over the last month. Anything we collect beyond that will go toward paying down the overall remaining cafe debt (which is substantial, but not an existential threat).
Literally anything you can do will help. Have $5 bucks? $500? We'll put it to work keeping our operations going long into the future.
Some people have also been contributing outside the platform, which is just fine and gets the funds in our pocket much sooner. Here's how you can do that.
- Book a seat for one of our classes on Forbidden Tickets or Bloom to keep our regular cash flow flowing
- Send contributions via Zelle to Mir@WickedGrounds.com
- Send contributions via Venmo to Venmo.com/WickedGroundsI
- Send contributions via PayPal to paypal.me/RBWickedGrounds
Once we hit our first goal of $11,681 for this creditor and stretch goal of $17,681 for the great unfucking, I do plan to keep the GoFundMe open and apply anything else straight to paying down the substantial debts we incurred in the last year keeping the cafe open. I appreciate anything and everything that y'all are doing.
I went into yesterday morning truly wondering if we'd lose the Grounds over this. I know now -- once again -- that there's no way y'all would let that happen. Thank you.
With true love and gratitude,
Mir
ORIGINAL POST IF YOU MISSED IT
I'm Mir and I'm the owner of Wicked Grounds, a leader in adult education around consent, boundaries, relationships and adult play.
As you may know, we started out as Wicked Grounds Cafe & Boutique: a physical home for the queer & leather community to gather, rabble-rouse, connect and play. For nearly ten years, the cafe was our home. While the pandemic lockdown had us physically closed for 18 months, we built up our educational programming to become a well known leader nationally and even internationally.
Unfortunately, our attempts to reopen the cafe & boutique post pandemic were extremely difficult, and we were unable to operate at a profit from the time COVID resurged in early 2022 until we made the sad decision to close the space in June 2023. During that time, we incurred nearly $80k in total debts just to meet payroll, pay the rent, and keep serving milkshakes. In June 2023, we made the sad decision to move entirely to education and let that beloved community space go.
Contribute to our GoFundMe to retire this debt!
Over the past six months, we've been reinventing ourselves as a force for adult education. We offer 25-30 events per month. And I've been working in good faith with most of our creditors to get our old debt paid down and get onto a new footing.
Well, except one.
I have one creditor who is 1/3 paid off, but is threatening to wreck the whole business over the $11,679 they are still owed. These folks are putting liens against our receivables, causing significant challenges to our cashflow (and making it nearly impossible to get our other commitments met in a timely manner). Everyone else is working with us but . . . these guys? They have got to go.
I don't have that kind of money sitting around. What I have is a drive for community education, a desire to move forward into what we're becoming, and faith in my community.
Contribute to our GoFundMe to retire this debt!
Your contributions in any amount will allow us to get this monkey off our back, restore our day to day cash flow, and keep the Grounds strong for the long term. If we are able to collect anything above the $11,679 goal, that will be put toward first paying down educators in our community whose payments have been slowed by this situation, and then toward the remaining cafe debt. It would be lovely to get this retired entirely so that we can move on toward the future.
Any amount helps. Your faith in us helps. And thank you.
With gratitude,
Mir
PS: Hate GoFundMe? That's fine. Here are other ways to be helpful:
- Book a seat for one of our classes on Forbidden Tickets or Bloom to keep our regular cash flow flowing
- Send contributions via Zelle to Mir@WickedGrounds.com
- Send contributions via Venmo to Venmo.com/WickedGroundsI
- Send contributions via PayPal to paypal.me/RBWickedGrounds
