First: my apologies if anyone gets this twice! I encountered a software glitch with our email list when I first tried sending this, and I'm not quite sure if it went out or not.

We've been on a long journey together, growing and changing over time as the wider world changes. You've put faith and trust in us, and we try to give it right back.

I've been hoping to avoid another ask for help, but it's become unavoidable. So I'm coming to you with a full heart and lots of faith.

I'm Mir and I'm the owner of Wicked Grounds, a leader in adult education around consent, boundaries, relationships and adult play.

As you may know, we started out as Wicked Grounds Cafe & Boutique: a physical home for the queer & leather community to gather, rabble-rouse, connect and play. For nearly ten years, the cafe was our home. While the pandemic lockdown had us physically closed for 18 months, we built up our educational programming to become a well known leader nationally and even internationally.

Unfortunately, our attempts to reopen the cafe & boutique post pandemic were extremely difficult, and we were unable to operate at a profit from the time COVID resurged in early 2022 until we made the sad decision to close the space in June 2023. During that time, we incurred nearly $80k in total debts just to meet payroll, pay the rent, and keep serving milkshakes. In June 2023, we made the sad decision to move entirely to education and let that beloved community space go.

Over the past six months, we've been reinventing ourselves as a force for adult education. We offer 25-30 events per month. And I've been working in good faith with most of our creditors to get our old debt paid down and get onto a new footing.

Well, except one.

I have one creditor who is 1/3 paid off, but is threatening to wreck the whole business over the $11,679 they are still owed. These folks are putting liens against our receivables, causing significant challenges to our cashflow (and making it nearly impossible to get our other commitments met in a timely manner). Everyone else is working with us but . . . these guys? They have got to go.

I don't have that kind of money sitting around. What I have is a drive for community education, a desire to move forward into what we're becoming, and faith in my community.

Your contributions in any amount will allow us to get this monkey off our back, restore our day to day cash flow, and keep the Grounds strong for the long term. If we are able to collect anything above the $11,679 goal, that will be put toward first paying down educators in our community whose payments have been slowed by this situation, and then toward the remaining cafe debt. It would be lovely to get this retired entirely so that we can move on toward the future.

Any amount helps. Your faith in us helps. And thank you.

With gratitude,

Mir

PS: Hate GoFundMe? That's fine. Here are other ways to be helpful:

• Book a seat for one of our classes on Forbidden Tickets or Bloom to keep our regular cash flow flowing
• Send contributions via Zelle to Mir@WickedGrounds.com
• Send contributions via Venmo to Venmo.com/WickedGroundsI​
• Send contributions via PayPal to paypal.me/RBWickedGrounds