December 2024

Dear Partners,

Despite a global trend towards style over substance, I was still alarmed that 2024 continued to be a strange couple of years for Yefe Nof. We are quite literally living through a time where we witness that as environments change, so, too, do the organisms that tend to live in those environments. But is it survival at any cost now? After a massive snowstorm last year we rehabilitated the house so that our California Writing Residencies could take place. This past October, Core Resident and Miles Franklin Award winner, Jennifer Down, evacuated Lake Arrowhead as the raging Line Fire threatened the house. And this month we made arrangements for the Ukrainian winner of our Emergent Translator Residency, Marta Gosovska, to forgo the physical part of the residency because she is unable to obtain an entry visa to the USA. Yefe Nof is no different than any living organism. Whether the environment is going hot or cold with natural problems or human-generated problems, the substance of our work is impacted by unforeseeable circumstances that we have to put into consideration going forward. Even if we wanted to maintain the façade of being resolutely consistent to our origin story and ideals, without careful analysis and planning we would not be able to guarantee our ability to make the same positive benefit into the future. 

If you want it brief, our organization needs to change. We have to take a step back and get informed so that we can adapt. 

This past year we concluded that the worldwide confusion of politics with public service broadened our existential crisis, but our causes for concern were mainly conjecture. Rational calculations have made us what we are today and they will make us what we want to become tomorrow. What we want to become is a wide-reaching charitable organization promoting an open dialogue of ideas. So far what we are is an established residency providing time and space to writers, researchers, and designers for finalizing their ideas. To date we have been committed to selecting the work which best met our selection criterion, which is not controversial, but somehow the factors contributing to the polarization of our modern Western societies seem to be affecting us. To be extra poetic, we think that everything around us is already within us and that what is happening in the world seems to be threatening our capacity to achieve our mission. So, this coming year, with your support, we are going to collect data for a major strategic review and work on an extensive planning process in which we will project what is important to our stakeholders and what will be viable for us at least into the next decade of our existence. 

Some of us think that lacking the hard data to understand everything, we should not be stuck on seeking answers. Others want endless discussion. We have decided to compromise and reach a new alignment moving forward by thoroughly developing our options and acting. Today we are asking you to support that with a donation, or to stylishly support that by internalizing the spirit of our aims and remain connected with us. All of the best nonprofit organizations operate like businesses and are able to adapt to the shifts in the environment. Whether they revisit their missions and visions on a regular basis, there are still fixed costs and financial decisions that can outweigh all the others.

Please make a tax-deductible contribution to our program which will allow us to continue to pursue a strategic path to vitality. 

This year, once again, when you make a contribution you will automatically be invited to ALL LIT UP #5 – our annual benefit that takes place live from Paris, December 26 on Zoom and is managed by my own Moontown Walking Travel. Whether or not you have ever been to Paris, this year we are going to celebrate renewal with the return of Notre Dame and all that goes into craft – from the lightness of creativity to the painstaking reconstruction – emphasizing American writing, European research, and global dialogue in translation. None of this is artifice intending to hide inflated self-importance or an unwillingness to fail. We came to accept that there are always highs and lows to our shared existence. How we proceed through those highs and lows is up to all of us.

This is your culture hub. I look forward to our mutual joys in the coming days.

Sincerely,

Gil