We are very, very happy and we want to share the news with you! At Goteo.org, your preferred crowdfunding platform, born in 2011 and specialized in projects with social impact, we have reached € 10M raised after its nine years of existence.

We celebrate the fortune of having your support every day, but of course, reaching that beautiful and round figure has given us a special joy. Being part of this community with more than 1200 funded projects and many more thousands of people benefited through them is wonderful.

It seems like yesterday when 86 people, the first 86 believers in this crowdfunding platform project, co-financed the first campaign: Mobile Node, a radio station free transmission that incorporated mobility to the citizen wireless network guifi.net, extending it to provoke new social practices in the urban environment, mixing physical and digital public space.

Since then you have been hundreds of thousands. Specifically, today, 134,756 have donated on some occasion and 23,196 have done so in more than one project. When you look at the statistics, you will see that some have even collaborated on hundreds of initiatives.

This is one more way, among many others, through which we help this society to get closer and closer to the one we dream of. A mutual support society that inspires. From the beginning, we believed in the success of this proposal and knew that there was the "fertile land", the "energy", the "community" ... or whatever you want to call it! It only took someone to summon her and give her a channel.

That is what we did (and continue to do) on this platform that is already yours, joining forces for this growing democratic, ecological and social awareness through which we understand that cooperation is not only a fundamental but necessary tool to face the challenges of globalization.

The darkest hour is just before dawn

Everything comes when it has to, and we reached this milestone at a painful and demanding moment as a society. With our lives immersed in a pandemic that tries to paralyze us at all levels: relational, health, soul, work ... From the outside in and from the inside out.

But as someone wise said, living is not so much what happens to us as what we decide to do with what crosses us. And we believe it, so the whole team of Fundación Goteo had one thing clear: if this platform already has a meaning, a function and a mission in "normality", in this exceptional situation we should not and we would not lower our arms: we would row even louder. This figure comes, then, like everything that comes without warning, to illuminate a dark moment. A critical stage in which we already know that some lives and projects have ceased to exist.

Our trust in the community is based on experience, and the experience of these past few weeks is a breath of fresh air. Dozens of projects have given us back that trust by creating on Goteo.org to launch campaigns aimed at alleviating the effects of covid19. Hundreds of donors have supported these initiatives and thousands of euros (because yes, until further notice, many of the resources to energize an initiative require a minimal amount) are already available to disseminate and build a collective response scenario.

Let the joy be worth

Just as we say that love is worth joy and not worth it, at Goteo we look back at moments like this and we want to enjoy with you some of the many projects that we have accompanied. Starting far back, it was in 2016 when Correscales It received € 128,859 to enable a resistance box to support the strike of technicians and installation technicians working for Movistar-Telefónica, subcontracted and autonomous. It is, in fact, the highest-grossing campaign in Goteo's history.

Years later, with #PorTodas (88.948€) We became co-editors of the LaMarea newspaper, opening a main section of the supplement dedicated to reporting on sexist violence. Starting in 2019, those complete stories of each of the women murdered in 2014, victims of gender-based violence, are being published, thus strengthening the entire feminist movement in an independent media, campaign milestone when achieving it with a shower of donations for the minimum just the last week.

Knowing that reality is a perception made up of many perspectives, your collaboration was key in the delivery of [Maldita] (https://www.goteo.org/project/maldita): journalism so that you don't get caught (€ 77,260) , a pioneering entity in Fact-Checking in Spain and that in its campaign managed to become independent as a Foundation, betting on crowdfunding for its values for the collective and to expand the community. Today his work fighting "hoaxes" is vital for the democratic health of this country.

In achieving that positive footprint that your donations manage to create through campaigns, the initiative has a special place Top Manta · Legal clothing made by illegal people (€ 67,184), the first fashion line launched by the Popular Union of Street Vendors in Barcelona. There were 2465 people who supported the creation of an entity that aims to help improve the living conditions of the group of street vendors in Barcelona, as well as the search for regularization and work opportunities. His communication campaign is one of the most powerful that we can remember with very elaborate designs and video pieces.

When we talk about civic crowdfunding we are referring precisely to the collective capacity to propose and finance entities that can change society in a profound and consistent way: legislative changes, the application of restorative justice and citizen mobilization to preserve fundamental rights. This is the case of Soterramiento Ya #HelpMultas (€ 20,837) with which a call was made to support the neighborhood struggle for the undergrounding of the roads of the train in Murcia, as well as preventing the passage of the AVE on the surface.

It was in [Denouncing the torturer] (https://www.goteo.org/project/denunciando-al-torturador) (€ 13,168) and #CrowdfundPaRato (€ 18,359) the financial resources were gathered to file complaints against the torturers of Francoism and to finance the first lawsuit of the people against the bank, respectively. Results? In the first case, admitted complaint against the torturer González Pacheco in Spain, for considering the facts constituting crimes against humanity.

In the second case, admission of the complaint and imputation to Rato and Bankia, initiating the Bankia Case, for which in 2017 he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison, for a continued crime of misappropriation and entered the Soto prison del Real, where he is still serving his sentence.

Said like this, it seems simple, but there is always a lot of work behind it. Key to the awareness of historical memory was the impulse of the Commune of Presx and Reprisals of Francoism, promoting up to three campaigns in total to finance the complaints. For the already mythical # 15MPaRato campaign to become the first crowdvocacy campaign and get the first € 15,000 in 24 hours, it took many months of mobilizations with the common goal of making justice prevail against bank abuse.

There is the importance of the free media, with whom we have always woven together. For example, with the campaign Quién Manda (12.860€)we draw the map of power in Spain. Do you want to know who sits at the most important tables and what is their connection? Well Civio, Goteo's good ally with whom he has already promoted three initiatives, you will have all the names and positions. Data transparency for a freer and fairer society, in short, are two of the many objectives we share.

And still we cannot claim victory, because the capitalist system is transformed as it is fought. So it is in the present, when we have in campaign the one promoted by the Sindicat de Llogaters i Llogateres (€ 36,051) financing the creation of the Barcelona renters union in defense of the right to housing and for fair rents. Fons Cooperatiu per l'Emergència Social i Sanitària (47.905€ and still in the campaign) is the Cooperative Fund to support the initiatives that are being articulated in response to the Social and Health Emergency in the face of the covid pandemic19, being more agile than the action of governments. With this campaign, Goteo reinforces its mission as a tool at the service of cooperativism for mutual support in the sector.

From that "drip" goes, if you allow us the expression, to see how an idea materializes in action through your contribution, to leave a visible mark. A Democratic, Social and Ecological Footprint that goes from the present to the future we want. As we learned in even darker times, there are still those who want to bury us, without knowing that we are seeds.

There's no a Plan(et) B

For us it is evident. We cannot remain impassive. No territory, institution or government can stay on the sidelines. The effects of climate change are already causing much suffering.

Let's save the goddess Maat was one of the first projects to be co-financed and remains unique in its proposal: to repair the Goddess Maat , the Ecologists in Action sailboat, so that you could continue navigating the protection of seas and coasts.

Gure basoak, gure etorkizuna-Our forests, our future (€ 37,459) proposed and obtained the resources to create the most extensive oak forest in the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, printing a colossal Ecological Footprint, when "dripping" with us an entire planted forest.

Rebrotem was one of the highest-grossing campaigns (€ 105,322) in Goteo, due to the ambition of its objective: to revive the Ribera de Ebro and the affected areas for one of the largest fires of the last decades in Spain. Of course he focused on all the consequences of such a disaster, to contribute to all Traces. Clearly the main one was the Ecological Footprint, demonstrating that crowdfunding can help repair such an ecological misfortune.

To care you have to love and to love you have to know. For this reason Salvaje (€ 53,540) was the magazine that wanted to get us out into the field to get to know it and did so with a special edition to claim our nature and give voice to our towns. His desire to disclose the rural environment through a self-published publication seemed beautiful and intelligent to illuminate the debate on Spain Emptied.

We are the testimony of what is to come

Hope is said to be the art of writing the future and, unlike faith, is well aware that action is necessary. Do you want to know a secret? Before starting all this, in 2011, we already imagined having gotten this far, where we are now. We did it like they do in climbing: we imagine the goal from the point of arrival, rather than the point of departure. We imagine that we have already reached the top and "remember" how we got there, visualizing the previous step and then the one before this, and so on until we reach the beginning.

In that exercise of imagination, we already saw all your testimonies and thanks for having been able to be useful in realizing your idea. How did you make it known to your community and also to all those people who did not know you yet, but were willing to do it and support you. We saw your enthusiasm and your joy when reaching the objective.

We also saw that it would not only be an individual thanks, from the personal satisfaction for having contributed to society, but a whole declaration to the following generations that it is possible to build free places to grow collectively by putting life at the center.

With this confidence it was enough to start, the purpose was clear and the route was correct. It was only possible to develop strategies and tools to achieve the objectives: crowdfunding, crowdvocacy, matchfunding ... and many other new concepts that are yet to come to guide us in these seas in which, although we are not all in the same boat, we are hit by the same waves .

Thus, we trust in the future and we will take advantage of the circumstances that are offered to us to solve this adventure with motivation and self-esteem. Because we know that our ability to imagine possible future junts is that powerful and manifests itself here and now.