Deceleration has delivered so much—for so very little. Here's how you can help us grow through the years ahead.

When you are sharing out your dollars this year, consider what the world needs most and the returns those investments will bring. We know that the world needs a rapid energy transition and dramatically different ways of being, including our position as individuals, communities, and cities. In San Antonio and South Texas, Deceleration is all about that shift. And we are poised to grow.

Through 2022, Deceleration continued its work against long odds, fueled exclusively by our personal savings account and $300-$400 per month in small personal donations from our supporters. We delivered to you analysis of local climate justice realities, sharing stories of climate solutions from San Antonio and communities around the world found nowhere else. We built mapping tools for understanding environmental justice struggles and promoted critical events and actions across the South Texas bioregion.

Some of you may recall how in the early onset of COVID, Deceleration launched regular Deceleration.Live programing with news interviews, guest musicians, poets, and even meditation instruction in an effort to help bind together our threatened relations and shared community power. (And, yeah, we even donated our time to teach other local nonprofits how to use the tech we were relying on for these programs.)

In 2021, we grew from there into more long-form journalism, spotlighting, for example, the human toll of our climate inactions, such as in Marisol's excellent series about her shared efforts to assist an unhoused neighbor who lost limbs to Winter Storm Uri (and was hospitalized for heat stress just months before that). We were the only area media to our knowledge to attempt to quantify the unmet physical—and emotional—needs harming our communities more than a year after Winter Storm Uri. (Our survey results are here.)

When summer of 2022 arrived, we built a powerfully illustrated bilingual Extreme Heat Survival Guide with our friend Carly Garza we hope to develop further for future heatwaves and distribute as door hangers to residents in the most heat-threatened neighborhoods. Our neighborhood-level maps of inequitably distributed energy burdens have been used by none other than CPS Energy to prioritize community outreach efforts. Rudy Garza, you may recall, instructed his teams to consult our research, telling members of San Antonio City Council in December of 2021 of Deceleration's maps:

 

“Deceleration News put out a really insightful article about the Census tracts with the highest utility burden. … I sent that to my chief customer officer and said, 'When we start knocking on doors, we're going to start knocking here, where the 20 percent utility burden is showing up.”

— Rudy Garza, CPS Energy CEO

And with the City beginning to explore the impact of heat island on residents, we hope they give a look to our map of the impact of heat island—which is again the most granular that we are aware of, allowing a neighborhood- (and Council District-) level response.

In recent months, we excelled in our watchdog journalism, demonstrating through the delivery of documents secured by Open Records requests how City of San Antonio staff in Parks and Public Works have routinely misled the public about the plan to fell roughly 100 trees and forcefully evict the migratory birds that have long congregated in Brackenridge Park. These documents we made freely available to all and our stories are Creative Commons and free to republish—with both the San Antonio Current and NowCast SA dipping in for.

We have also been the only media to expose how Mayor Ron Nirenberg sat on a controversial report about energy conservation manipulations within CPS Energy under its former CEO while the Council deliberated on a $350M conservation package vote for the utility.

Here's a few other unique offerings we've delivered:
 

• We were the first (and maybe only) Texas media to profile a Round Rock-based couple working nationally to undermine Biden's conservation agenda.
• We were the only media at the recent Climate Justice Alliance national gathering in San Antonio.
• And (again) we may have been the only media outside of Corpus Christi to spotlight the Clean Slate candidates seeking to upend local politics in that critical coastal community whose port leads the nation in oil and gas exports.

We've hosted some incredible guests heard nowhere else in the regional media landscape: talking on the Deceleration podcast about the rise of ecofascism (and how to recognize it) with a team of academics from around the country, for instance, and caught up with a former CPS executive about an exciting new model of solar power seeking inroads in South Texas.

We've had a few guest writers come in with us. Mobi Warren shared news about her noble work with “Why I'm Making the Bee Maker Available Free to Teachers.” We really hope to develop resources for educators on climate justice in the years ahead. Meredith McGuire dished on the shortcomings of local utility rate structure in January in her column calling on Council to reject a rate-hike request. Jesse Harasta of San Antonians for Rail Transit wrote about a growing effort to centralize rail in local transportation+climate planning.

You get the idea. I could go on.



Take five minutes to explore Deceleration.news today.

Understand: We have done all of this with very little financial support—a $5,000 small grant in 2021 and flying entirely on our savings and $4,000 from small-donor support this year.

There is so much we want to do still to help plant the necessary steps toward a healthier more climate-secure world here in our bioregion for the earth—and all her families. If any of this is valuable to you, and you are in a position to help, I invite you to commit today to a small recurring donation.
 

Here is our support page with links to our PayPay and Patreon accounts.

If you are the sort that would rather write a check, our address is:
615 E. Houston #1794, San Antonio, TX 78296.

In coming weeks, we expect to see our second small grant—for $25,000 this time—to reach our account. That doesn't even begin to compensate us for our labor. And, honestly, to try to do so would only slow our ability to further develop Deceleration to serve the entire South Texas bioregion as we imagine. (For just $1000 we could purchase access to these same mapping tools for Corpus Christi. We are really interested to see how heat island impacts are punishing that community.)

So we have decided to put as much of this new month as possible into growing a pool of Deceleration contributors and working to leverage this small amount into future operational funds. To effectively fulfill our mission, we estimate an operating budget of $200,000 at minimum.

(Perhaps you saw our job ad on Craiglist or even filled out our Google form for Volunteers and Contributors.)

The only way to begin to achieve these goals is through the power of volunteers.

Growing freelancers (and, we hope soon, staff) requires a level of bookkeeping we have been able to avoid to date. But no longer. So we have very specific requests beyond each and every one of you becoming a $5-per-month Patron of Deceleration...we are expanding our community advisory board to help guide our steps going forward. And we are looking for folks ready to pool their talents with us, as well.
 

Volunteer Opportunities:

• Bookkeeper: Someone to donate a few hours per month to help us maintain best practices in accounting to stay on the good side of the IRS and our nonprofit designation.
• Business manager: Someone to lead effort to grow the operation and maximize our impact through relationships.
• Grantwriter/Fundraiser: Help us tap more pockets of investment.

We have received several offers for editorial assistance, proofing articles and building up the Deceleration Events Calendar (watch this space!). We've had some queries about writing stories for us in 2023, strong pitches we are excited about. We can't imagine anything better than sharing the voices of our friends developing responses to the challenges of this moment.

But Marisol and I know also that these key operational positions—the business side of Deceleration—can't be neglected any longer. So please reach out of you have skills of this sort to share for a thriving San Antonio and South Texas.