[Mod Post] Happy New Year and Announcements
Dear Fatshionistas,

The last time I checked, Fatshionista’s membership has climbed to 1037 registered members. Wow! That’s more people than live in the town I grew up in--seriously. We want to use the 1000 member milestone and the New Year to make a few announcements about the pending developments of Fatshionista.

First, thank you all for making this community such a success. Fatshionista has become a beacon of self-acceptance and an incredible resource to people from all over the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. There are fatshionistas from many racial, ethnic, regional, and socioeconomic backgrounds, with different abilities, sizes, shapes, and genders, and we’re all figuring out how to coexist and make something great together as we go along. While this community isn’t perfect, we hope to carry on creating a space in which social justice principles lead our interactions and our quest to find self-acceptance, relief from fat discrimination and stigma, and stunningly hip and well-fitting clothing. We are both creating and changing culture with this community, all because of YOUR participation.

We’d like to announce our intent to begin creating fatshionista.com. While we hope that the livejournal community always remains intact, the fact remains that we are seeing some limitations in the livejournal community model as Fatshionista grows and develops. We want to be able to create forums for an array of topics that are constantly ongoing, develop a centralized resource center for fashion, beauty, health, politics, and community building, and showcase featured writing and content. We want to develop a vehicle for member sales that is easier to manage. We want more user-friendliness and to take Fatshionista to the next level.

With this step, I think it’s important to be crystal clear about my investment in this community. Since I started this community in 2004, it has been the equivalent of a part time job for me to help maintain and moderate this space. theoryofgravity and the other moderators, misadventurelad, idlepudding, and originalenid have also donated hours upon hours of their unpaid labor to keep Fatshionista functioning on top of jobs, school, and personal commitments. I see us moderators as community stewards, whose role is to guide the development of the community and to meet the needs of the membership, all while keeping a vision of fat self-acceptance in mind.

As we develop, issues of money, ownership, and the existence of this community within a capitalist economic system are going to become more apparent than they are now. We want to start raising money and using it to develop the community. We are about to start incurring administration costs. Right now, I personally own the domain fatshionista.com and many of its variations. At some point very soon, we’re going to plan the financial component of Fatshionista’s growth, and we will definitely need your input on how best to do it and still meet the community’s needs. At the very least, I plan on using my 9+ years of experience as a nonprofit financial manager to help lead the development of Fatshionista. Want to lend YOUR skills to help? Please comment with what expertise you’d like to contribute to the community and how we can get in touch with you.

Finally, we’d like to announce the Official Fatshionista Logo Contest. We really need a logo! We’d like to invite all of you to send high-resolution images of logos that are solely your creation to me at amanda@fatshionista.com. Please include the name “Fatshionista” somewhere on your design. The moderators will cull the entries and ask for feedback from the community on choosing a final design. The logo contest winner will get to see her work on the very first official Fatshionista teeshirts and badges, which will be sold to raise money towards the administrative costs of our development outside of livejournal. The Official Fatshionista Logo Contest will end on February 15, 2007.

As always, any feedback you may have is encouraged. Know that I will have no internet access at work today, and won’t be available for response until late tonight, pacific standard time. I will do my best to comment on feedback and answer all questions then.

Thanks again for making Fatshionista an amazing place.

xo
Ama