Your Donations Add Up To Big Help 

--by Abe Mwuara

OVEC has long had a very lenient membership policy. The dues are generally "give as you are able." Your donations, no matter how small (or large!) go a long way toward supporting our work. The donations we receive from folks like you give us flexibility. We can use your donations, coupled with general support grants from foundations, on things that may not be covered by our project-specific foundation funding. You can check out the ways we use your donations by reading our newsletters and e-mail action alerts (to join that list, e-mail vivian@ohvec.org) and visiting our website.

To prove to you that we are serious about "give as you are able," Maryanne Graham, our office manager and accounting angel, and I recently spent about $4.50 of staff time to come up with a short list of how even the smallest donations are important to the work that we do.

-$1.00 pays for a 15 minute call from the office in Huntington to members in Williamson who are beginning to organize around water quality issues from the impoundment in their area.

-$2.00 pays for a single newsletter, from the printing to the mailing. Our newsletter keeps people informed, and is used in and out of state as an educational tool. We even have some libraries on our mailing list.

-$2.00 pays for 6 letters to the Corps of Engineers and other government agencies to submit comments on various proposed mountaintop removal (MTR) sites, sludge impoundments, buffer zone rule changes, the draft environmental impact statement on MTR, proposed floating coal synfuel plants (gasp!)… and to just generally to chew them out.

-$2.50 pays for mailing foundations our grant proposals, which allow OVEC to continue our outreach to coalfield communities on the issues of mountaintop removal and sludge impoundments, and the legislative work of passing Clean Elections in West Virginia.

-$3.00 pays for a week of newspaper subscriptions, which allows the OVEC staff to stay on top of local and worldwide events that affect our work.

-$4.00 pays for a ream of paper on which we can print everything from letters to legislators, to informational fliers, to hand-outs for events.

-$5.00 pays for 83 pages of printing. This allows us to produce everything from fliers and brochures to fundraising letters.

-$5.00 pays for ¼ of our electric bill allowing me to type out this highly informative article.

-$10.00 pays for 1 day of rent for this office space. The view isn't too great, but it does give us enough room to work and store materials. And at least we do have windows now.

-$10.00 pays for 2 day's upkeep of the website. Yes, it's worth it! Have you been to our website lately? The website allows us to do outreach to hundreds of people who go to the website every week. We get requests for permission to use our photos weekly, sometimes daily, from students, text book publishers, and publications as large as the New York Times, to as small as groups' newsletters. We ask for a donation from the for-profit publications, while we ask non-profits to link to our website. The website also allows web surfers to surf on in and make an on-line donation through PayPal. Maryanne said that almost as soon as we set up PayPal on the website a while back, we received a donation from someone in California.

To donate to OVEC, no matter the amount, hit the "donate" button online or send a check to:

OVEC

P.O. Box 6753

Huntington, WV 25773