The Sprawl is growing once again! We've won $165,000 in grant funding and I'm very happy to welcome two new people into our newsroom: Miranda Martini and Jeremy Appel.

Miranda is our new membership editor. She is a writer, editor and musician based in Calgary. Her most recent essay, "The Drinking Gourd: Three Tales," can be found in the 2020 anthology The Black Prairie Archives, and her music can be heard in the new NFB film "John Ware Reclaimed." As The Sprawl's membership editor, Miranda will be spearheading new ways to build and engage our rapidly-growing membership base.

Jeremy Appel is our new municipal politics reporter. He gained notoriety at the Medicine Hat News, and co-hosts two podcasts—The Forgotten Corner and Big Shiny Takes. His work has also appeared in CBC Calgary, Jacobin, and Alberta Jewish News, among others. Jeremy will be focusing on the intersection of municipal and provincial politics in the run-up to the 2021 civic elections in Alberta.

Miranda and Jeremy join Taylor Lambert, who became The Sprawl's Alberta politics reporter in September. Taylor's incisive coverage is giving our readers much-needed context amid the chaos of provincial politics in 2020.

All of these new contract positions are possible thanks to a $135,000 grant from the Facebook Journalism Project (this includes the $40,000 we announced in May). We're one of 15 North American news outlets who received this funding by participating in the Facebook Membership Accelerator, a program focused on building sustainable membership models for local news outlets.

This funding means we can hire more journalists and freelancers at a time when other newsrooms are cutting them. There are no editorial strings attached. The only requirement is that we use the funds to grow our membership in order to be sustainable. So that's what we're doing.

We know from experience that good journalism is more powerful than anything in driving membership.

Also! In October we received a $30,000 grant from the Canada Periodical Fund. These federal funds are part of the special measures for journalism announced by Canadian Heritage in the wake of COVID-19.

In early 2021, The Sprawl will publish a transparency report so that you can see, in more detail, where we're getting our money and how it's being spent.

This grant funding has kickstarted The Sprawl's growth—but it will not sustain it. For that, we need you.

Three years ago, The Sprawl was more or less a one-man newsroom. Thanks to our 1,650+ members, our team has now grown to seven people. In September, Ximena González, The Sprawl's assistant editor, became our first full-time employee besides me.

Our goal now is to hire a third full-time journalist.

To do that, we're aiming to reach 2,000 members by the end of 2020. We began this year with 842 members and since then our membership has nearly doubled.

This goal is within reach.

If you're not a member yet, sign up and get a copy of our new member-only zine (we'll pop it in the mail for you). Let's keep growing this together!

Jeremy Klaszus is editor-in-chief of The Sprawl.