A draft of the WisCon ’22 schedule is now available at WisCon.net! If you filled out the interest survey to participate on panels, please log into the app, view your personal schedule, and accept or reject your assignments by April 9th.
Even if you did not fill out the survey, there are still panels that are understaffed. If you see a panel with three or less people assigned and it’s something you’re passionate about, please volunteer by emailing panels@wiscon.net. And tell your friends!
Hi all! We have a few major updates to share with you as we reach the end of March:
1. We are capping in-person memberships at 600 this year as a safety measure. Most years, our cap is 1,000, which is the maximum capacity of the hotel. At the last couple of in-person WisCons we’ve reached roughly 850 to 900 members. To date, we have sold about 260 in-person memberships for WisCon 2022.
If you are planning to attend WisCon in person, we strongly encourage you to register ahead of time and book your hotel room as soon as you’re certain of your travel plans. Discounted hotel room rates are available until April 26, 2022. We understand that planning travel during the pandemic is more complicated, but for the safety of all our members, we will need to stick to the 600-person cap and may not be able to sell tickets at the door this year. Remember you can always double-check your registration status and convert between online and in-person memberships!
Note that this cap does not affect online memberships! We have no plan to cap online memberships and are happy to welcome everyone who wants to attend virtually.
2. Regarding our Guests of Honor:
If you’re interested in attending WisCon in person but need a little financial help to get there, you have until March 31 to apply to the WisCon Members Assistance Fund!
Please apply at: https://bit.ly/WMAFrequest
Because of the ongoing pandemic, this year’s WisCon is going to feel different from past years, which is probably no surprise to anyone. One of the changes for 2022 is that the ConCom has decided not to print the Souvenir Program book: it requires a lot of volunteer time and costs us a lot of money to produce. It’s rough not to have a book this year, but we need to save our energy and funds for other aspects of the con.
We’re working to make sure that the information members need in the printed book will be available in other ways, including online and through more basic printed materials.
This means that we urgently need a Print Manager! This is a volunteer position that’s a project manager to oversee the creation and printing of the materials we’ll need for this con. This person will coordinate with Departments (to gain what information needs to be printed), with volunteers on the Communications committee (to lay out documents), and with printers (submitting orders & pickup). Prior experience with printing is helpful but not required: this is mostly a communication and logistics type of role.
More details below! If you are interested in volunteering, please send an email to personnel@sf3.org as soon as possible and mention the Print Manager role.
Role Title: Print Manager
Department/Team: Communications
Reports to: Communications Co-Chairs
Time Requirements: 1-2 hours per week between March and mid-May (rough guess, since this is a new role!)
Presence at con: Beneficial (if unable to attend in person, will need to coordinate logistics for any print jobs that need to be picked up)
Term: One year
Role summary: The Print Manager oversees the creation and printing of any printed materials needed at WisCon. This person coordinates with Departments (to gain what information needs to be printed), with volunteers in Comms (to lay out documents), and with printers (submitting orders & pickup). We aren’t planning to print a program book this year (WisCon 2022); instead, we have a number of other smaller print jobs that need project management.
Pre-con:
The WisCon Member Assistance Fund (WMAF) provides financial assistance to people who would like to attend WisCon but for whom the costs of con attendance are a barrier. Anyone can apply to request funds that can be used to cover airfare or other travel costs, hotel costs, childcare, or any other prohibitive expense. Members may also nominate friends or others who they know would like to attend WisCon but who may need a bit of help to do so. You can find more information on the WMAF here.
Applications are now open and the form is here: https://bit.ly/WMAFrequest. You can nominate yourself or a friend, and people who have received funds in the past can request them again. The deadline for applying is March 31st. If you have questions or trouble using the form, e-mail fund@wiscon.net.
If you would like to donate to help someone else attend WisCon, THAT WOULD BE AWESOME. You can donate to the WMAF via PayPal, here. (SF3, WisCon’s parent organization, is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, so contributions are tax-deductible.) You can also donate via the Registration Page! If you’re not registering, you can simply add “Donate to WMAF” to your cart and add whatever amount you’d like to donate, and pay by the means of your choice. Finally, if you would like to send a paper check, make it out to SF3 with WMAF in the memo line and mail to: SF3 / Attn: WMAFund / P.O. Box 1624 / Madison, WI 53701.
If you request funds, you should hear by mid-April whether we will be able to meet your request.
The WisCon Art Show deadline is being extended to March 15! Artists can apply using the form at http://wiscon.net/events/art-show/. If you’ve applied and not received a reply from us, please email artshow@wiscon.net.
The Madison Public Library is running a four-part book discussion series featuring titles by the four WisCon 2022 Guests of Honor. These book discussions will happen virtually and are open to interested participants from any location. The first one is coming up on February 28th from 7-8 p.m. CST and will be a discussion of Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse. You can register to get the Zoom link on the Madison Public Library site.
Register for the February 28 discussion of Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse.
Register for the March 28 discussion of Phoenix Extravagant by Yoon Ha Lee.
Register for the April 25th discussion of Nine Bar Blues by Sheree Renée Thomas.
Register for the May 23rd discussion of Black Water Sister by Zen Cho.
The Panel Interest Survey is Now Live!
If you’re still mulling over whether you’d like to come to the con in person, our Health and Safety plans for WisCon 2022 are also now available.
This update is written by me, Kit Stubbs (they/them), both in my role as Treasurer for SF3, WisCon’s parent not-for-profit organization, and in my role as WisCon 2022 co-chair. Thanks to Ira Alexandre (WisCon 2022 co-chair, acting Personnel chair) and Aileen Wall (WisCon 2022 co-chair, Hotel) for their help.
First of all: Thank you to everyone who participated in our recent Town Hall, as panelists and attendees! Special thanks to our Board members Arley, for organizing and moderating, and Annalee and Charlie Jane, for organizing and helping with logistics.
WisCon’s roots are grounded in white feminism, and WisCon continues to struggle with racism and with finding ways to center attendees of color who have been harmed. The Town Hall marks a key point in our antiracist work to bring WisCon, particularly as experienced by our attendees and volunteers of color, into better alignment with our values—even if this means that white attendees will have to sit with discomfort.
Working towards a more antiracist con is just one of the major challenges that we face. Unless we, the WisCon community, also take significant action this year in terms of finances and our volunteer pool, within the next few years we will no longer be able to run WisCon.
Why? What’s going on?
Right now, in addition to pushing harder on antiracism, WisCon is facing big challenges on two other fronts: money and labor.
TLDR:
What are the financial challenges?
Ideally, when we finish running one WisCon, we should have enough money to cover our expenses for the con that’s happening in two years. Why? Because shortly after each WisCon, typically, is when we sign a contract with the hotel for the con that’s happening in two years. As a ConCom member, I remember hearing “WisCon is very slowly losing money” for several years now. But it didn’t really seem urgent, somehow.
In an ongoing-pandemic world, this has become urgent because of the way our hotel contract works. Right now, we only have a contract signed with our host hotel for May 2022. We have committed to the hotel that WisCon attendees will reserve a certain number of rooms over a certain number of nights. This contract was signed pre-pandemic and assumed normal pre-pandemic WisCon attendance. We pay the hotel some extra rental fees, but most of the hotel space the con uses we get at steeply discounted rates, assuming that we fill those hotel rooms. We’re allowed to reduce our commitment before the deadline by 20% at no penalty, but if we have more unsold rooms than that, WisCon has to pay the hotel for them.
The budget that was approved by the previous Board assumed that we would have fewer in-person attendees this year, but it assumed we would still book our entire block of hotel rooms—the same size hotel block that we would normally book pre-pandemic.
But if we’re expecting fewer in-person attendees, we should also expect fewer hotel rooms to be booked, and that is a cost that WisCon is really not able to absorb.
Couldn’t we just cancel the hotel contract?
We can’t afford the cancellation fee. If we cancelled now, according to our contract, we would owe the hotel $158,000, which we absolutely do not have the resources to cover.
I’ve run some new, conservative budget projections since becoming Treasurer in October. These projections account for online memberships, which our current budget doesn’t (yay!) but also accounts for attrition in hotel rooms, which our current budget also doesn’t (oh no!). I assume that we will take a big hit on hotel rooms in 2022 and that we’ll gradually recover in 2023 and 2024.
If we take no action to change our current trajectory and only book half of our contracted hotel rooms in 2022, SF3 will go broke: We will have spent about $7,000 that the organization does not have.
If we want to get WisCon to a healthy place—meaning we’re at best fiscal practice and have enough money for the con that’s two years out in the bank—we need about $76,000 more in income for 2022 to our general fund. (This $76k doesn’t include funds for any new initiatives, this is just basically keeping the lights on. And this is separate from any WisCon Member Assistance Fund fundraising we do, since WMAF dollars legally can’t be used to pay for anything except grants to members for travel assistance.)
The good news: I’m not saying that we need to suddenly raise $76k in donations alone. This income that we need could come from selling more memberships (online or in-person), booking lots of hotel rooms (so we don’t have to pay the hotel for unused rooms), selling Dessert Salon tickets, grants, or donations. An additional $76k of income to our general fund would help keep us afloat through 2022 and 2023 and help ensure that we would have the funds to run in 2024 and 2025.
If someone were to magically appear and donate $76k to us right now, though, we’d still be in trouble because of our other current challenge: a lack of volunteers.
What’s going on with volunteers?
We’re in a volunteering crisis right now. It takes about 70 pre-con volunteers to make WisCon happen, and we have barely half that.
SF3 is WisCon’s parent not-for-profit organization. WisCon happens because there are a bunch of committees of people within SF3 who do the work, and right now, we have a record number of vacancies.
SF3 has a Board of Directors. Under the Board there are four committees: Personnel (helping to recruit, onboard, and offboard volunteers); Communications (taking care of the newsletter, website, and social media); Strategic Planning (looking at our vision and mission); and the ConCom (the Convention Committee, which handles the logistics of running WisCon). Of those committees, only the ConCom has chairs right now—Personnel, Communications, and Strategic Planning have a few volunteers, but none of these three committees has a leader.
The ConCom itself is made up of the three co-chairs and 28 departments of varying sizes. Currently we have 8 departments that are completely empty and at least 8 that are critically understaffed.
In general, the ConCom has been dwindling for the past several years. We had 71 members in 2017, but only 56 members in 2019. (Here is a graph showing Concom participation by the numbers over the past several years.)
If you’re reading this now, and you’re already a WisCon volunteer: Thank you. I’m not writing this expecting you to suddenly start putting more work on your plate. (If you have the extra capacity, great! But I’m not expecting that of anyone.)
The State of WisCon
We are definitely having a WisCon in 2022. Without more volunteers, we won’t be able to offer nearly as good an experience as we have in the past. Without more financial resources, WisCon 2022 may be the last one.
I believe these challenges are surmountable, but as members of the WisCon community, we have to act quickly to make change.
What are WisCon organizers already working on?
What can I do to help?
Yes, we recognize the pandemic is still going on—if you’re able to book your hotel room and/or register early, great! If you’re able to chip in financially, great! But if not, no worries.
We need to address our issues with money and labor within a larger antiracist framework. And I think we need to be honest that we’re in a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation: We’re short on money and volunteers to implement new antiracist policies and practices, which we need in order to attract and retain volunteers, especially volunteers of color.
If you’ve made it this far: Thank you. Posting this feels like the scariest thing I have ever done as a WisCon/SF3 organizer, and I really appreciate your time and energy in reading it.