No one has ever been this eager for an NPR pledge drive. But here I am, getting impatient. Every morning I listen, waiting for that nagging plea to interrupt my daily news. For years I’ve reached for the dial; today my wallet’s ready, splayed open on my desk. Just in case.

With just three days left of The Farmers Guild crowd-funding campaign, we’re still a couple thousand shy. Unless we reach our total goal, we don’t see a dime. Those are the rules. And yet, even if we don’t make it, I will personally come out richer than I was before.

The Farmer’s Guild recently became a non-profit organization. Though it’s been around for a while, fund-raising to sustain our efforts has only just begun. And so, in the wake of the online crowd-funding craze, we launched our own: $15K in one month using the new farm and food focused platform Barnraiser. We set various reward levels, updated social media, called in a few past favors. We knew it wouldn’t be easy. But I had no clue what I was in for.

By the end of week one, despair had already set in. We should’ve been a quarter of the way there. Instead we’d barely reached nine percent, thanks in large part to a few friends and family members — early birthday gifts, not a sustainable funding model. I began to question the value of our grass-roots work, whether it belonged instead in the hands of government bureaucracy and corporate campaigns to distract the public.

By week two we should’ve reached the halfway point; we were stuck at nineteen percent. But that’s when a funny thing happened. My pockets, they began to loosen. A colleague’s campaign, to start a farm school for the Grange, had regrettably begun the same month as ours. I pitched in at the level of a t-shirt bearing their logo. Next, my roommate launched a campaign to crowd-fund his new fair-trade chocolate company. My typical frugality would’ve shunned an eight-dollar bar of chocolate; immediately I pre-ordered three. Then, for the first time, I invested money. (Mind you, there are more lucrative ventures than starting a non-profit). Through a crowd-sourced loan program called Kiva Zip, I advanced twenty-five of the few dollars I have left for a young farmer to get her own business up and running.

Had desperation led this skeptic to gamble on karma? Unlikely. Instead I’d begun to see past a different myth, that of scarcity.

On the right-side column of our crowd-funding homepage you find four numbers: the total money raised, the days left, the percentage, and the total number of backers. By the end of the third week, those first three numbers were still far below what we needed, but my focus had by then shifted. For three weeks I’ve been hitting re-fresh each minute and while that hasn’t changed, my eyes now focus instead on that other number. And according to that number, we’re rich! One hundred and thirty-four backers! And we grow richer by the hour.

Who are all these benefactors?

Some are poor young farmers, others are good-intentioned neighbors concerned about the future of their food, but despite drought and recession, they all see themselves as having enough to give.

They are not insufficient cogs in a greedy and inescapable system, but empowered players who allocate value where it belongs. Each dollar they spend is a free choice to make the world what they want it to be.

From farmers markets to crowd-founding platforms, today we have new ways to proactively and directly express our values, not just pay “our bills”. Today, buying groceries at the local market, individuals can focus on the numbers that enable our local farmers to grow food in ways that uphold our ideals, stimulate our local economy, and preserve our land.

Here at my screen, I’ll focus on that fourth number, the total number of backers: each time it goes up, not only is our own organization’s mission empowered, but I know there’s yet another person out there who recognizes his or her own personal power and the abundance in their act — an act not of giving or of paying, but of enabling, a personal expression of what they stand for. That’s a number worth counting, the kind of number that will enable a new food system. That number make us all rich.

And so…

Dear NPR, I owe you nothing for the many years of neglect. But inspired by the actions of one hundred and thirty-four people, I finally see my own wealth and the power I possess to make you possible. Finally I will get that tote bag.

Evan Wiig
The Farmers Guild