Cause Celeb

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Celeb: Natalie Merchant, adult contemporary singer

Cause: Jamestown, N.Y., Boys and Girls Club

What she’s done: Monetary donations and personal appearances

What celeb gets: A chance to give back to her own hometown

What cause gets: Money for teen pregnancy prevention and academic assistance programs; a chance to let potentially bored and troubled kids meet a local girl made good.

Connection between celeb and cause: Unlike most celebrities and their causes, Merchant has an organic connection with Jamestown Boys and Girls Club: She was a child member of the Jamestown Girls Club (before it merged with the Boys Club), says the club’s executive director, Judy Moore.

Chance celeb will humiliate cause: Merchant’s earnest singing persona fits snugly with the club’s approach to life’s travails. She’s not apt to let them down.

What good came of this? Neither Merchant’s publicists nor Moore will reveal the precise amount of her donations (Merchant’s publicists don’t want it to be seen as a publicity ploy), but Moore said it was enough to hire a new counselor. In 1997, Jamestown made news as the place where one man allegedly infected nearly a dozen local teen girls with HIV. Only time will tell if another counselor can prevent a similar incident.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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