Ahoy, all: We've made it to September! Whew.

Our big news for the month is that we have started assembling our Effing Foundation Advisory Council! I am thrilled to introduce you to our very first two Advisors, Mr.BLK of The Black Pomegranate (@BlkPomegranate) and Crista Anne (@pinkness).

         
(Mr.BLK; left; Ms. Pomegranate, right)                                (Crista Anne)

Hi everyone,

This newsletter is getting out to you about a week later than I had planned, which means it's going to sound a lot more serious than I was initially expecting.

I just got back from my first time attending the Woodhull Freedom Foundation's Sexual Freedom Summit, a conference on sexual rights which strives to be intersectional. I met all kinds of folks including legal professionals, reproductive justice activists, sexuality educators and students, and lots of awesome bloggers. If you're passionate about sex-positivity and want to meet a diverse group of folks working for human rights, I highly recommend this conference.

So I thought I was going to be taking July off from this newsletter...but then awesomeness happened, so I wanted to send out a quick note to let you know:

The Effing Foundation is now available on Amazon Smile! If you choose to shop at Amazon.com -- and I recognize there are totally valid reasons not to -- you can select the Effing Foundation to receive a small donation from your eligible purchases. Go to https://smile.amazon.com/ch/81-4822649 to get started.

A joyous June to you all!

After all of the excitement receiving our 501(c)(3) status, the rest of May was relatively quiet. Our registration with Massachusetts finally went through, and we've also updated our information on GuideStar. Next projects include moving our budget and bookkeeping to QuickBooks and recruiting sex-positive artists and educators for our Advisory Council.

A Merry May to you!

Wait, what's this? A letter from the IRS?

Welcome to April!

Every time I sit down to write you, I can hardly believe another month has passed. I told you last month that I had been sick in February -- and then it dragged on through most of March. I'm now slowly digging myself out from two months' worth of email and trying to make headway on building the Foundation as I can.

A marvelous March to you!

After the excitement of finishing our IRS 501(c)(3) application at the beginning of February, I was ready to tackle huge swaths of our to-do list, and then I realized I had to quickly catch up on organizing for teasecraft, our meetup group for folks interested in DIY sex toys and equipment. (Boston-area folks, we've got a Show & Tell featuring the Nogasm automated orgasm denial device on March 17, and we're celebrating teasecraft's 5th birthday on May 19.)

A fabulous February to you, friends!

Yesterday I went to the post office and carefully dropped off a package containing the fruits of my labor over the last month: the Effing Foundation's application to be classified as a public, 501(c)(3) charity, all 50-plus pages of it. YEAH!

Why would anyone spend literally tens of hours filling out an interactive PDF form that won't let you save your progress so that every time Acrobat Reader crashes you have to type the whole thing in again?

I'm glad you asked!

Well, everyone, we made it to 2017!

This is probably going to be a pretty challenging year, but we made it here together.

The end of last year went remarkably well: As of December 22, 2016, The Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, Inc., is officially incorporated as a not-for-profit!

2016 is almost over: We've made it to December.

When I sent out the October newsletter, I was extremely hopeful we'd be incorporated. October turned out to be a pretty challenging month in terms of my personal life, and then the first half of November hit me pretty hard (as I imagine it did for many of you). I recognize that there are many folks, especially people of color, who have been suffering longer and struggling much harder than I have. I'm trying to use the privilege that I have in some areas (as a white, educated, relatively well-off person) to help other people, while spending time within less-privileged communities I'm a part of (as a non-binary/trans, queer person with a chronic illness) to take care of myself.