Help Dino raise $1,000 for Lighthouse Writers

Hi everyone,

I’m writing you today to ask for your support for Lighthouse Writers Workshops. As many of you know, I love this organization. I first started writing because I took a class at Lighthouse. My first piece published in a literary journal was workshopped at Lighthouse. For the past four years, I’ve been teaching creative writing classes at Lighthouse. And, for the past year and a half, I’ve put in a lot (and I mean, a lot) of hours as a Board member of Lighthouse.

Why do I do all this? For one thing, there’s nothing like watching someone find their voice in a piece of writing, working past their deepest vulnerabilities, their flaws, their fears, striving to understand and give life to characters who are different from them, and all the while, wrestling with what it means to reach out to a reader, to a wholly different person who will bring the entirety of their experience to the story or the essay or the poem and hopefully find something of themselves in it. 

This is a scary thing to do, but it also essential. When we write and when we read, we get to sit down and converse with people from the past, from the future, and from the now. People who we might never otherwise get to sit down with. It widens our world.

And Lighthouse—well, Lighthouse gets people writing. And sharing. It offers classes and workshops and festivals and retreats. It has programs specifically for schoolkids, for queer people, for vets, for people of color, for medical professionals, for unhoused people, for people struggling with challenging addictions, for people experiencing serious illness. Lighthouse creates community and communities. 

And very recently, after 25 years of renting, Lighthouse built its own permanent home, a beautiful state-of-the-art facility in which people from all walks of life can gather, learn, and share. A totally wired building allowing folks from all over the country—and world—to join in. But as anyone who has worked in non-profit knows, the first few years in a new facility are the toughest. Unexpected expenses pop up. Demand for programs surges. This is why I’m writing you today, hoping you’ll make a year-end gift to Lighthouse during Colorado Gives Month. A gift, by the way, that Lighthouse’s Board—myself included—will match 1-1 up to the first $30,000. 

What will this money go to? To free community programs, like our Hard Times workshops, where someone struggling with addiction can work to find their voice. To scholarships and financial assistance, so that everyone—the kid down the street; the single mom; the retired person on a fixed income—can take Lighthouse classes. To online capacity, so that trans kid in Florida can find community at our monthly Queer Creatives meetings. To all this and more, much more.

“One word at a time” is the theme of Lighthouse’s Colorado Gives campaign. It’s how a piece of writing is created. One word leads to the next. Similarly, each gift—and I’m hoping you’ll make a gift—leads to the next, helping to secure the health and future of an organization that has, over the past 25 years, worked to bridge the gaps between countless numbers of very different people. At a time when too many folks are trying stop that flow of words by banning books and censoring voices—particularly the voices of queer writers and writers of color—we need Lighthouse more than ever.

Thanks for reading these words…..Dino