Russian-speaking Community Council (RCC) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization incorporated in 2011 and based in New York's Washington Heights. We are the only immigrant and refugee advocacy and services nonprofit of political exiles from Russia and other post-Soviet countries with authoritarian regimes. RCC was all-volunteer until last year. We are currently staffed on a part-time basis and are working on transitioning to a fully staffed organization with regular working hours.

We are looking for assistance in developing our pitch to prospective donors to reach our fundraising goal of $100,000. This volunteer would assess our audience, help craft our message, highlight our unique proposition as an organization, and co-lead pitching sessions with potential donors. RCC has conducted advocacy, organizing, and occasional services for over 10 years on an entirely volunteer basis due to severe systemic discrimination in funding against our community and our speaking truth to power in established institutions that were supposed to serve our community. In the meantime, we achieved recognition at the city, state, national, and international levels, took part in meetings with the Obama and the Biden administrations staff, and obtained our very first services contract on the scale that has allowed us to pay two part-time salaries. We are now looking to solidify these gains and obtain additional funding and/or contracting required to make our community services sustainable over the longer term.

This will enable us to fulfill our mission to "help our community overcome the barriers to its successful integration in American society, by providing social services, advancing its civic participation and leadership development, and promoting mutual understanding and collaboration with other communities".

This would be a great investment of a volunteer time as it would help strengthen the unique organizational voice of pro-immigrant, pro-refugee Russian- and Russian-speaking new Americans, reduce the discrimination that they face in the public arena, and enable new asylum seekers from former Soviet countries to get culturally competent services in their own community on a more regular and sustainable basis.Our preparations include:
1) part-time office in Northern Manhattan where we are based;
2) extensive selection of materials about our organization and prior contacts with potential funders;
3) full range of online tools including website (with work done on SEO), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, and LinkedIn with thousands of subscribers run for many years on an entirely volunteer basis with vast amount of facts, photos, and videos demonstrating our community service, its value and work;
4) availability of our part-time executive staff for supervision, guidance, and participation in relevant discussions and activities;
5) readiness to collaborate on developing communications, PR, and business plans, as well as marketing and social media strategies, upgrade and fine-tune our key message, website design and application development.

Once the project is complete, we plan to use the raised funds toward hiring a professional fundraiser and a full-time operations manager for our social services site.