Thanks for your interest in sustaining and growing SOULS. Here's what you get as a Patron:

$1 - Digital Friends + Digital Hugs & Hi Fives
$3 - Sneak peek of upcoming SOULS of San Francisco documentary
$5 - SOULS of San Francisco ebook
$10 - Monthly Google Hangout
$25 - SOULS Post Card
$50 - SOULS Tote Bag + Post Card
$100 - SOULS T Shirt + Tote Bag + Post Card
$200 - Your story told on SOULS + T Shirt + Tote Bag + Post Card
$500 - Magical day with Dijon + All other rewards

Here are the top 3 reasons we're on Patreon:

1) Build a community on www.soulsofsociety.com

Most of the community of 160,000 people is on Facebook. Nowadays going on FB can be draining, so I've also had a beautiful website built to showcase everything SOULS has become (photojournalism, music videos, podcasts).

The next step is to give people the ability to create profiles and message people on the site so everyone can connect. The money from your pledges will help to build out the site more so that it can replace FB as the central meeting point for the SOULS community.

2) Hire and train new storytellers in new communities

I've learned more in the past few years walking around talking to people on the street than I learned in any other time in my life...including college. My goal is to empower other people to be storytellers in their own communities so we can build an even larger community that shares even more perspectives.

3) Build a team to run and manage the SOULS movement
In order to grow this movement we need money to be able to pay people. There are costs associated with maintaining the site. I want to keep the site ad free so that the user experience isn't compromised and so that the messages being shared are authentic.

Here's what we'll use the money for:

Building a team. We are looking to hire other storytellers to be on the ground telling the stories of their own communities. We want to pay people to contribute their time and energy. We're going to try hiring storytelling to tell 5 stories featuring photos about a specific community for $500. We also need people to handle things like posting to social media, spam comment deletion, store creation and upkeep, store customer service, and a bunch of other little jobs. These things end up adding up to a few hours every day, and without help, I end up doing it all and have much less time to connect with people to create stories and build the community.
Hosting. We need a robust enough hosting plan to support the highest spikes in traffic we ever get so we don't crash during those moments and ruin my happiness.
MailChimp. The service we use to email posts out to the subscription list. This fee grows as the email list grows.
Ongoing web development. It's a website, so there are always upsetting glitches coming out of nowhere and occasionally, we add a new site feature. Neither of us has any programming skills, so we need to pay someone for this.
Facebook post "boosts". When we announce a new post on Facebook, where 99% of our social media following is, this makes sure that the announcement gets onto 1/3 or 1/2 of our Facebook followers' News Feeds.

Anyways, thanks for any support you decide to give and thanks for being part of this community movement!

This video was made by http://www.startmotionmedia.com