Perhaps you could say in the past five years or so, that the primary audience we wanted to get on board with cellular agriculture were early career scientists – people who would make up the talent pool of the field and push the frontiers of cell ag science. Amplify and leverage the expertise of our staff – by maintaining a team of scientific and food policy experts who are doing incredible on-the-ground work with moving cellular agriculture forward on the global stage with governments and institutions, and by making our comms output more focused on publications and less on social media.Extend runway so we could fundamentally shift our fundraising strategy – towards more government/major foundation support, that was less market-dependent (but slower), and,.Maximize impact at the lowest headcount – by reducing comms and admin.Our thought process in accomplishing this, was to: We were able to drop our burn rate from $201,209/mo to $118,500 and maintain the vast majority of our research grants and impact work in safety and infrastructure. That extension was not without cost – we had to part ways with three incredible people from our communications and admin teams and rein in all discretionary spending. Thanks to the supporters who stepped up that day, we were able to extend our runway to at least one year. All of this was thrown in sharp relief at our conference later in June, where our community came together to show their support and collectively raise an astounding $1.3M. Instead, this moment of need did two things: 1) It revealed our impact-in the leadership stories of so many individuals in the cellular agriculture community and 2) It revealed our ongoing importance-in the generous giving of dollars, services, cell lines, and profits. We didn’t know what this radical display of vulnerability might lead to: Would we be criticized for being too bold in spending on research? Would we lose the trust of our community? We would be out of money October 31, 2022, and that we needed all the help we could get to keep New Harvest’s vision in motion. The following newsletter update was sent out to share the enormous fundraise that arose from that call for help and the steps the organization pursued to ensure its impact going forward. Over a month ago, our Executive Director called an Emergency Town Hall to discuss the future of New Harvest given a dwindling runway.
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