2026 has been an interesting year for The Urbanist. Our political endorsements are twice as popular as they were in 2025, we have a new website offering ad-free reading, and our coverage has grown to include the Eastside and cities outside Seattle more than ever before.
We're proud of our growing journalistic beats, but it also spreads our small team thin.
During this membership drive, we are asking you to help us fund the hiring of another employee. By helping us reach our goal of 100 new members by September 25th, you will put us in a position to sustainably grow our coverage, both geographically across the region and in the diversity of topics we cover. Members also read ad-free, as a treat!
With the Seattle media ecosystem in flux and local journalism on the decline, The Urbanist has been able to stay consistent and sustainable. We need your help to grow and expand our reporting on everything occurring in our region. A bigger team will also help us ramp up advocacy efforts to push for the urbanist future we all want.
If you would prefer to give to our 501(c)(3) arm, or take advantage of employer donation matching, you can direct donations to The Urbanist Fund, which supports The Urbanist’s (501c4) apolitical work.
Curious What Your Donation Actually Funds?
Want to know what we’re using your donation for? You can peruse our 990 form, but the short answer is: paying staff.
The longer answer is that the vast majority of our expenses go towards paying our staff and freelancers. We pay business income tax despite being a nonprofit because of the advertisements on the website. Between taxes on the ads and the cut our third-party ad provider gets, we lose 1/3rd of revenue on ads – yet another reason we prefer donations!
Program expenses include technical expenses, such as website hosting expenses, and event program expenses, mostly venue rentals for panels and talks.
The single most important investment we make to bring you well-researched and well-reported news is qualified staff. That means reporters who know the region, understand urbanist policy, and have connections to the organizations and people who make policy decisions in our cities. All of this is to bring you, the reading public, the best reporting about urban issues in the region.
Support our writers by helping us hit our goal for this member drive and continuing to read and share our work!
Update to Our Newsletters
Along with the member drive, we are finally completing the switch to the new website. If you were previously on our newsletter but not a donor, we created an account for you and subscribed you to the same newsletter you were on before. This is because we are ditching our old email sending service (Mailchimp), saving money and streamlining our workflow. All good things!
You can sign in to the website using the same email that you used to sign up for the newsletter. From now on, you can adjust your donation, manage your newsletters, or change the email address you want to be reached at through the website.
Want to get on our newsletter? Sign up here.
