The Ecologist has enjoyed remarkable success in the past two years, growing the audience for our website by millions and our newsletter by tens of thousands. That success has been made possible because hundreds of authors are contributing their work for free, because they want to get the message out to as many people as possible.

However, we have established that some communities and interests are underrepresented among our contributors - and even more so among our readers and members. We are establishing an Ecologist Writers' Fund specifically to address this issue.

We want to raise £12,000 each year with £10,000 going directly to our authors and £2,000 covering administration of the scheme and other core costs for the website. We will pay £200 for 100 articles across the year. We will ensure that the money goes to those who most need it.

The fund will help us ensure that Black, Asian, and minority ethnic writers, Indigenous writers, LGBTQI writers and other authors from other marginalised groups are well represented on our website. We want everyone to know that The Ecologist is the place to come for environmental news and feature stories that are about our communities and for our communities.

We acknowledge there have been historical biases and other reasons why marginalised groups are not fully represented at The Ecologist. We also understand that we cannot ask people from those communities to correct this wrong from their own resources.

This is why we are asking our current readers to provide a small amount of financial support so that we can represent everyone, and ensure as many voices as possible can spread our message of celebrating and saving nature and our communities from climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse and social injustice.