July 2020 Transparency Statement

After the brutal and violent police murder of George Floyd, Unicorn Riot was on the frontline of the uprising in the Twin Cities gathering the voices of the community. In the weeks following, Unicorn Riot received an amazing and incredibly humbling amount of support. With this support comes added responsibility as an organization that serves many communities across the U.S. and the globe. This responsibility we do not take lightly.

Throughout the Spring of 2020 our viewer-supported, independent, non-profit educational media collective was celebrating our 5 year anniversary with around $8,000 in our checking account and our incoming donations diminishing from the worldwide economic turmoil catalyzed by COVID-19. Since May 26, we are now looking at upwards of a million dollars having been donated to our media platform. This, again, we do not take lightly.

We are horizontally organized and we make decisions with consensus of all our members. We are in the process of hammering out details as to our next steps financially. While we haven’t finalized our plans, here are a few things we are discussing:

  • Creating a fund that will continue to ensure that Unicorn Riot remains an independent media organization for the community
  • Intentionally and ethically building our infrastructure and growing our organization
  • Providing our members a stable wage with benefits
  • Helping to develop the next generation of media-makers with youth programming in Minneapolis, MN

While we work to organize administrative tasks that have become much more complex in recent weeks, we expect to have a clearer direction to share with the community after our financial reporting is completed for the the 3rd quarter of 2020.

Unicorn Riot is a 501(c)(3) educational nonprofit media organization registered in Minnesota. Per state statute we will be filing an independently-audited statement with our other 2020 disclosures in 2021.

Fundraising vendor statement: We would like to clarify a position about UR’s relationship to ActBlue. Unicorn Riot is registered on ActBlue Charities, a payment processor that hosts donation pages for many 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations. There is an independent political advocacy organization sharing the ActBlue brand that operates independently of it—Unicorn Riot has no relationship with that organization. As a 501(c)(3), our organization is not involved in elections finance.

Accessibility statement: Unicorn Riot takes accessibility seriously as we aim to release educational media to all audiences. Our next website theme, soon to be launched, follows ARIA compliance and WCAG guidelines, and we have made design decisions to robustly support screen readers and other accessibility technologies as much as possible. Our YouTube channel generates captions automatically during live broadcasts. We also aim to release multi-lingual captions for our longer features.

Please contact [email protected] for comments and concerns about accessibility or to submit subtitles or translations for our videos.

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Unicorn Riot media is published under Creative Commons’ 3.0 US license (CC NC-BY-SA 3.0 US). As long as you follow the license terms, you are free to share and adapt any of our content.

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