We are very pleased to welcome readers to the 8th edition of Fundraising for Social Change. This book has been in continuous publication since 1985, but this edition includes significant changes from previous versions. First and most important is that we moved from one author, Kim Klein, to coauthors, Kim Klein and Stan Yogi. Kim and Stan have worked together for many years, and Stan is a senior consultant with Klein & Roth Consulting. Stan reviewed the last edition of the book, identified information that needed to be changed or updated, and he took the lead on writing about legacy giving. His most important contributions to this book, though, are the two history chapters that comprise Part Ten of this edition. While both of us have trained, consulted, and preached (and occasionally beseeched) organizations to understand that a successful individual donor fundraising program will give them maximum freedom to pursue their mission, in these chapters Stan has documented how doing that worked for organizations in two social justice movements. To give readers a taste of what is possible, Stan drew from research and his own experience in the LGBTQ+ Justice Movement and the Immigrants' Rights Movement to show the critical role of individual donors in a cross section of nonprofits that support the overall trajectories of these movements.

In addition to this original writing, Kim and Stan invited a diverse group of fundraisers and resource mobilizers to share, in what we call “spotlights,” brief reflections about their fundraising experiences. Twenty‐five people across a wide range of ages, races, and geographic locations wrote about a number of topics: how and why they have stayed in fundraising for so long, what most surprised them about fundraising, how they have dealt as fundraisers with white supremacy, and how much they love a particular fundraising strategy. These reflections, which appear at the ends of several chapters throughout the book, are as varied as the people who shared them, and they provide insight into the joys and challenges of fundraising for social change.

In the end, this is a how‐to book. Although the information in these pages is useful to almost any nonprofit, our goal is to provide organizations with budgets of less than $2,500,000 (which constitutes the vast majority of the world's nonprofits) the tools and information they need to establish, maintain, and expand a broad base of individual donors. We are particularly committed to organizations working for racial, economic, and climate justice. We believe that you can tell almost anything you need to know about an organization's fundamental values by looking at how they raise their money and from whom they raise it.

Because people have a tool to access the greatest source of information ever imagined—the internet—a book must provide something that the internet cannot: trustworthy and relevant information that can be easily understood. We have consolidated, vetted, and curated here information that would take days of internet searching and sorting to locate. We have examined everything we have written through the lenses of our own combined 70 years of fundraising experiences and those of colleagues we trust. We have made every effort to write simply and accessibly for people who have many other responsibilities aside from reading this book.

We invite you to add to our collective knowledge or share questions and concerns with us at [email protected].

Few people give money without being asked. So, make this your motto: “Today someone in our organization has to ask someone for money.”

Kim Klein, Point Reyes Station, California

Stan Yogi, Oakland, California