A Letter from Matt Warshaw, Executive Director of Encyclopedia of Surfing.

Hello surfers and all lovers of surf culture. The EOS 2019 fundraiser is ON (November 1-10), and if your credit card is already limbered up, click 

 to subscribe. We are a fully registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Tax-deductible!

In 2017, when EOS was flatlining, we put out the SOS and you guys 

. Today, we have 1,200 subscribers and a small rainy-day fund in the bank. New pages go up daily, and the Sunday Joint newsletter is a hit. EOS is stable.

But we could be doing way more. I'm a full-time EOS employee, developer Mark Augias is part-time—and that's it for staff. This year's fundraiser is mostly about getting another pair of hands involved. $50K in combined donations and new subscriptions gets us a new part-time person and throws some more hours Mark's way. $100K gets us a full-timer, more hours for Mark, and a small raise for me—I'm doing EOS for $30K a year and I'd be lying to say I'm not looking for a pay bump.

What's on our to-do list for 2020? Apart from creating and improving the pages you already know (Encyclopedia of Surfing, History of Surfing, Above the Roar), we've just added beta versions for two new EOS areas: Surfboards and Contests. Click 

 for a Contest page. Both environments are already functional and integrated with the rest of the site, but they need hundreds of pages to really lift off—which means added work hours, which means staffing up.

Meanwhile, we're still doing the non-sexy stuff: digitizing movies and videos, scanning old surf mags, tagging, keywording, databasing. The preservation work isn't glamorous, but it's the most important thing EOS does. We have to grab this stuff now. When the last analog version of a surf movie or magazine disappears or is forgotten, that's it, game over, kiss it goodbye. So again, more hands at EOS means more surf history and culture saved from the abyss.

A huge thanks to everybody reading this, all EOS subscribers and supporters, who have kept the site going these past few years. Building EOS is a privilege and a joy, and while I hope we rake in a Lotto-sized pile of money over the next two weeks, to be honest I'll keep doing this even if it just means keeping the core group—you guys—stoked and entertained.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting Encyclopedia of Surfing!

LEVEL UP: THE 2019 EOS FUNDRAISER IS ON!

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