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Your donations are needed and appreciated...
Material donations: The
main thing that TSS wants is cave information. Too much valuable information
has been lost by people who have died, quit caving, or at least quit caving
in Texas, and subsequently, their cave-related belongings were lost or
tossed. Irreplaceable material has disappeared, including single-copy unpublished
maps, undrafted notes of kilometers of cave surveys, rare and historic
photographs and films, cave lead lists, and cave location maps. Use this
media release form (PDF) file to donate your item. Less rare newsletters and cave-related
books have also been discarded, but all of these items have substantial
value in cave exploration and research. Please contact the TSS and pass
along anything you don't want or need. Let TSS decide if it's junk or not.
We are lacking many older issues of
The Texas Caver, for example.
In addition to information, TSS also needs some office equipment to sort,
store, and catalog information, and to produce publications. Our equipment
wish list includes: a folding machine (or access to one), slide-storage
boxes and archival quality slide-storage pages, letter-size file folders,
and paper. Since all material contributions are tax-deductible, include
a note estimating value, and TSS will promptly mail you a receipt to show
at tax time.
Monetary donations:
Printing
reports, such as the well-received The Caves of Carta Valley, drains
the TSS budget and is a major factor in the delay before additional publications
are printed. To solve this problem, TSS established a Publications Endowment
Fund. All contributions to the fund will be placed in an investment
growth account, the principal of which will not be spent, but will be allowed
to grow and generate sufficient interest to publish reports with little
or no demand on the general budget. This also means that often-requested
items like more pages, more photos, more fold-out maps, and color covers
for every report can be more easily and frequently included. The timing
of the first benefits of the Publications Endowment Fund will depend on
the number and size of the contributions. While an adequately-sized fund
may take several years to accrue, once established, the fund will assure
the continued publication of quality Texas caving information by TSS. In
the meantime, TSS will dedicate 10% of all its sales proceeds to this fund.
Individuals who contribute more than $500 to the fund will receive copies
of all available TSS publications printed to the date of their contribution.
Sponsors donating at least $1,000 will also receive copies of all TSS reports
printed over the next ten years, and sponsors donating more than $2,000
will receive copies of all TSS publications for the rest of their lives.
So how do you make donations? Any
way you want! The simplest way is to write a check to "TSS" and send it
to:
Jim Kennedy, TSS Office Manager
304 West Mockingbird Lane
Austin, TX 78745-3121
(w) 512-327-9721
(m) 512-663-2287
(fax) 512-327-9724
jkennedy@batcon.org
Be sure to indicate if it is for the
Publications Endowment Fund. Other donation methods are also possible;
for details on these and on getting proper credit to file your TSS tax-deductions,
contact Orion. And how much should you donate? Whatever you want. All contributions
of money, material, and even efforts in gathering, managing, and publishing
data are welcome, and are solely used to support Texas caving through a
detailed and up-to-date database.
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