FAQs from our donors

No, Stories of Color is not a nonprofit. It is currently run and primarily funded by a homeschooling family in Phoenix, Arizona.

No, we are not a nonprofit, and we understand that this limits the donation consideration of many. Regardless, Stories of Color remains our our gift to you.

We’re sorry, but no. We only accept donations by credit card, PayPal, and Venmo at this time.

Yes. Givebutter is the trusted platform we use for our fundraising forms, using Stripe as our secure payment processing backend. They are best in class companies when it comes to security.

Stories of Color launched on June 18, 2021 in celebration of the first federal observation of Juneteenth. At the time, we had only 200(ish) living book titles and a couple dozen of lists to pick from, but we quickly expanded the scope of our features and reach of our community in the months that followed. Since then, our catalog has expanded to thousands of titles strong—and it continues growing every season.

Of course, our story is still being written, and we sincerely can’t do this as we intend to without the generous support of donors like you.

While over 85% of our users are homeschoolers, 8% of our members are public and private school teachers, nearly 2% are librarians, and another 10% include non-homeschooling parents and grandparents. We do not exclusively serve homeschoolers, though homeschooling families are those that we set out to primarily serve.

We exist to encourage, entrust, and equip homeschoolers to spread a more diverse feast. We’re happy to further elaborate on our mission, if you’re interested.

Our vision is to become the most trusted platform for sourcing and sharing underrepresented stories about people’s heritages.

We spend roughly $2,400 each year on software to operate Stories of Color. We have also spent targeted amounts of money on small development projects to improve our primary website. We’re happy to share the software we use, if you’re interested.

At this time, we do not pay our curator or allies. In fact, the founder behind Stories of Color and her family covered this annual budget and other upstart costs for nearly 2 years before making donations possible.

Currently, Stories of Color’s book lists are absolutely free to everyone. That’s right, $0.00.

Stories of Color is a volunteer-led labor of love. It’s simply a gift that our founder and curator had hoped to find elsewhere, but couldn’t. So she did something about it.

In full disclosure, a few months after our launch, we did add affiliate codes to our Amazon links simply to contribute to the ongoing costs of maintaining the software we use—but the amount we make from those links is nominal. That’s one of the reason we have also now made it possible for readers to donate to our mission. We also now offer products for sale.

Regardless of our future features, though, we guarantee readers one thing for certain: However Stories of Color may evolve, we will never charge for access to the living book lists which remain our core focus. Seriously—those will be free forever. We promise.

In a word, wisely. Though our annual budget remains quite small, there are mighty forces behind us. Since our inception, we have served readers in over 100 countries, we have attracted thousands of members, our features have continually improved, and our user feedback has remained unanimously outstanding. Any donations given above our annual operating costs will be carefully stewarded to bless our community by expanding and enhancing this impact.

Read our 2023 impact report for the latest information on how we steward your generosity.

Of course. We would love to hear from you. Contact us today.

We acknowledge all donors who give $25 or greater, as well as those who give on a recurring monthly or annual basis. We typically acknowledge donations on our website the week that we receive any gift. If you do not yet see your name and it is longer than a week after you have given, please contact us so we can promptly address the issue.

If you do not wish to be acknowledged publicly, you may mark your donation as anonymous while giving or contact us to remove your name at a later date.