I’d been thinking of setting up a patronage thing for my social impact work. Why social impact patronage?

Passion: I love doing social impact projects, especially stuff that makes a positive difference to my immediate context in Singapore. It’s a bit of a side passion of mine, and I derive lots of meaning from making stuff that helps people. I guess I’m kinda like a social worker at heart, just that my tools and approaches of choice is tech.

Regularity: Invariably, I’ll get connected to people who are doing interesting stuff and I end up working on more stuff with them. Every month. COVID-19 had kickstarted the whole thing for me, and somehow people will ask me for help, or I will get wind of an interesting project and offer my help instead.

Funding: I recently got some grant money to create a chatbot to help charities discover social impact grants in Singapore. So that got me thinking: why not for all my social impact projects? And I do need some funds to buy and maintain domains, serverless hosting, etc. 

Support: The support I get from my peers and friends whenever I make something for social impact had been super encouraging. I get to work with awesome, talented folks on super meaningful projects that we’re all motivated to work on. A few friends had even bought me coffees because of these projects! One particular friend even nudged me to start this patronage thing. She said that many people do want to help with social causes but often due to busy lives or just sheer lack of knowledge or opportunity, they don’t how to. So patronage through a trusted friend is one good way to feel engaged and contributing via proxy.

Tech: I’m not on Patreon, but Buy Me A Coffee. I’d been on BMAC since the beginning and I love it’s indie brand more than Patreon. BMAC used to only accept one-off patronage “coffees”, but it now accept memberships with monthly subscriptions. So it’s all set up for me already. 

The cosmos seem to be conspiring to nudge me into this. But should I start it? I feel weird asking people for money to do what I consider as honourable pro bono work, done out of goodwill and altruism. Bringing in money seems to taint it somewhat, and moves it slightly into an ethically grey area, a zone with potential conflict of interest (between pure altruistic motives versus personal profit). Or am I over-thinking it because of my personal narratives that “money is dirty”? Likely so. And there are ways to keep it above board and transparent.

Should I should I?