BAT Fall Fundraising Drive – Please Support Our Mission and Message
Be a BAT Supporter—Donate today as we kick off our fall fundraising drive. Based on the last 2 days of events (Duncan Resignation & NEA Recommendation of Hillary), we hope to do a fall campaign that will see us buying either newspaper ads, billboards, or radio ads to get our message out about the attempt by billionaires to destroy public education! We can’t do that without your help!
Why should you be a BAT Supporter? Here is why!
1. Successful rally outside the USDOE in Summer of 2014 that led to a meeting with Secretary Duncan. We were able to be brutally honest with him regarding the USDOE’s education agenda.
2. Summer of 2015 BATs headed back to DC for the BATs Teacher Congress. The highlight of the event was that BATs from over 25 states convened on Capitol Hill with over 61 appointments to discuss education, children, and funding equity. 6 brave BATs occupied Bernie Sanders office which led to a lengthy phone call with one of his education advisors. BATs meet and escorted Jesse Turner into DC after he walked 400 miles from Connecticut to DC to bring to light the attack on our public schools. BATs also partnered with United Opt Out and Save Our Schools in a Mock Trial of Eli Broad, Rahm Emanuel, Campbell Brown, and Arne Duncan that was broadcast by Education Town Hall Radio.
3. Also, at the BAT Congress our Quality of Life Workplace Team met with the USDOE about teacher working conditions in this country. This meeting happened due to the partnership between the BATs Quality of Workplace Team and AFT on a study in which over 90,000 teachers filled out (30,000 completing) on the quality/working conditions of the teaching workplace. See here for the full report
http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/worklifesurveyresults2015.pdf
4. As a result of our Quality of Workplace Team, an amendment was written into the ESEA Reauthorization bill to study and assess school conditions for children and teachers.
4. BATs have presented at some of the biggest education conferences in the nation. Roots Camp, Netroots, AFT TEACH, and Network for Public Education.
5. BATs have a strong and vocal caucus in the NEA (NEA BAT Caucus) which now has over 200 members and who dropped 17 NBIs this year with 10 were approved. BATs will be applying for an AFT Caucus this year, so we will have caucuses in both major unions.
6. BATs continues to be a strong presence on social media, specifically twitter, where many of their campaigns highlights the attack on our public school children, our communities, and our teachers. See #evaluatethat #whatif and the hijacking of the #EmployeeFreedom hashtag that Right to Work groups were going to use to tout the fact that educators could not join unions.
7. BATs appears on radio frequently. Education Town Hall, The Rick Smith Show, The Jeff Santos Show, and Just Let Me Teach allow rank and file educators from BATs extend their voice over the airwaves to the general public and the nation.
8. BATs continues to support and partner with other organizations around the country in the fight for equity and public education. We have proudly partnered with Network for Public Education, United Opt Out, and Save our Schools.
9. Our state BATs groups have mobilized for on the ground action to bring to light the attacks on public education children, schools, and teachers. Our WA BATs have protested the Gates Foundation, our Oregon BATs protested Pearson, our Nevada BATs held a large rally in Las Vegas about the attacks on the teaching profession, our Florida BATs protested the Jeb Bush education summit, our NY BATs continue to work with NYSAPE and other parent coalitions to demonstrate regularly – the latest was a protest against Gov. Cuomo at the NY State Fair, our Ohio BATs were a strong force in a protest when Gov. Kasich announced his presidential bid. BATs are everywhere!
10. BATs will be filing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the case of Friedrichs vs. CTA. This is the case that could essentially make us a Right to Work NATION!
11. BATs have been featured in over 200 news articles from the Washington Post, to the New York Times, Time Magazine, and the Huffington Post. Google us!
What is this letter asking of you today? We are asking you to be a supporter of our work. We do not take money from large foundations but we rely on our friends in this fight and on people like you to support our work. Much of what we do costs money. We need funds to continue to operate our website, buy supplies, push out mailings, conduct robo calls, hold our yearly event, apply to conferences so that we can spread the BAT message, register BAT panels at education conferences around the nation, and to continue to get our message out in a variety of venues. We look to the future of BATs as unlimited possibilities. We look to being able to buy ads in major papers to counter the rhetoric of corporate education reform, we look to the possibility of buying moving ads to get our message out about the attacks on public education, we look to the possibility of buying billboards so that the general public can see in full view that their public schools are under attack by the 1% for profit. Our future has no limits if we have the revenue to do it. So, won’t you please be a supporter of our work?
Do you believe in our message? If so, please support it. We are now a 501(c ) 4 and have a structure built for success. See here http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2015/10/big-bat-surprise-month-bats-became-501c4.html (*donations ARE NOT tax deductible)
What will you get? We will be listing all of our supporters on our website for all to see at the end of this fundraising drive!
We hope that you will consider being a BAT supporter because that will tell us you believe in our work. At the end of our Fall Fundraising Drive (October 31) we will be putting all our supporter names on our BATs Wall of Supporters. We hope you will consider placing your name and/or your organization on that wall. You can donate on our website by clicking the PayPal donate button at the top left of this page. You can also send a check made out to The Badass Teachers Association, Inc, P.O. Box 1390, Bellmore, NY 11710. Thanks for being a supporter, you will NOT regret it.
In Solidarity
Marla Kilfoyle, Executive Director
