Why I'm Giving Away 10% of My Substack Profits

We know the problems. Let's support those with the solutions.

Since I made the move to Substack, I’ve been extremely fortunate. I have attracted a growing audience that is both interested in and supportive of what I have to say. I have developed a platform where I can discuss ideas that wouldn’t necessarily receive a fair hearing in the mainstream media. And I have attracted financial support from subscribers enabling me to make my content look and sound good. Moving my operation to this platform was a risk, and I think I can say now that it’s been a success.

But I also believe that this success imposes an obligation on me beyond making the kind of content my readers and viewers have come to expect. This is, in my view, a spiritual obligation. At the end of the day, talk is cheap; solving the problems that I talk so much about is much more difficult.

That’s why I am now committed to donating 10 percent of the net proceeds from this Substack to the Woodson Center, an organization dedicated to fixing many of the problems I often discuss here.

This country is in the midst of a crisis. Some aspects of that crisis are measurable—deaths from gun violence, opioid overdoses, political polarization, and so on—while others are amorphous and harder to name. Despair, dysfunction, and distrust are rampant in America. We can attempt to diagnose these problems, theorize their origins, and trace their contours. Such analysis is useful and necessary. But in the meantime, a great many people are suffering. They need help now.

That’s where the Woodson Center comes in. Since the 1960s, Bob Woodson has worked tirelessly to address the social and spiritual crises that afflict some of our most vulnerable people. The Woodson Center helps to fund and advise enterprising individuals and organizations that are doing tremendous things to repair and restore communities with seemingly intractable problems.

How do we support mothers who have lost children to violence and addiction? How do we successfully reintegrate former prisoners who have paid their debt to society? How do we establish resource centers tailored to the needs of specific communities? These are hard problems. The Woodson Center believes that they can be solved most effectively by people who come from within the afflicted communities.

I agree. That’s why I’m donating 10 percent of the net proceeds from this newsletter to the Woodson Center. In the coming months, I’ll also be inviting some of the people behind Woodson Center-supported initiatives onto The Glenn Show to talk about the vital work they do. We need to do more than identify the problems; we need to support people with the solutions.

Here’s an excerpt from my recent conversation with Bob Woodson in which he describes just a handful of the programs the Woodson Center supports. You can also find my 2020 conversation with Sylvia Bennett-Stone, founder of Voices of Black Mothers United here. (And if you’d like to donate to the Woodson Center directly, you can do so here.)