The Ten Dollar Bill Is Getting a Much-Needed Makeover

<a href="http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/close-up-on-a-ten-dollar-bill-10-us-3516704?st=d680b0d">chictype</a>/iStock

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Ladies—we have finally made it! On to money, that is. (I mean, sure, Sacagawea is on the dollar coin or whatever, but we’re talking real-deal-paper.) The Treasury Department announced Wednesday that a redesigned $10 bill will feature a woman alongside Alexander Hamilton, who has been on the note since 1929. 

Who will actually be featured on the bill remains to be seen, but Treasury Secretary Jack Lew will ultimately make the decision. The new $10 bill will debut in 2020, the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. 

The news comes just about a year after nine-year-old Sofia wrote to President Obama asking why there weren’t any women on money in the United States and included a list of potential contenders that included his wife, Michelle. He responded saying he thought it was “a pretty good idea.” The letter spawned a campaign called Women on 20, which launched petitions and created media to convince the president to put his money where his mouth is (literally).

It’s unclear if the decision was influenced by the campaign, but soon we will find out if any of their proposed female icons (the final-round votes on their website left Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, and Wilma Mankiller) made the cut.

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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 can’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.

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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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