Support Downtown Safety
This isn’t charity. It’s a referendum on who owns 1 AM.
Citizens, patrons, staff, and businesses are funding their actual night shift — a few dollars at a time, not waiting on millionaires. Orlando Mothers Watch counts the votes in public, weekly. Whatever else Orlando disagrees about, nobody’s against somebody’s mother getting you to your car.
The Public Ledger
That pledge outranks every other sentence on this page. The binding refund terms are being drafted by counsel into the gift acknowledgment before giving opens. TODO_COUNSEL
$0 — for now
The ledger opens the day giving opens; from that day the number updates weekly and every dollar behind it is published — beside the monthly counts the OMW App publishes: safe walks, de‑escalations, people helped. This is a referendum: Orlando votes with what it gives.
The goal: $242,000 — six full months of operations at full strength. The arithmetic — every line, floor and ceiling — is published on the Transparency page.
The giving link goes live the day Florida’s Ch. 496 requirements are satisfied — the sponsor’s registration confirmed in writing, the legal permission to ask. We don’t ask a minute before.
Fund the nights. Back the build.
Every movement needs two things: people on the corner and tools in their hands. Fund the nights — this page, the charitable rail — pays for the Orlando pilot itself: stipends, training, insurance, kit, the evaluation. Back the build — the Kickstarter campaign — creates the technology every city gets: the OMW app (in development now), the published playbook, the deployment kit. Kickstarter funds only the things being made, never operations — so the two never mix, and both ledgers publish. Give to either. Give to both. Orlando wins twice.
Honest units
What your money actually buys
$10
Keep the porch light on
The entry vote: water, supplies, and radio time for one corner, one night.
$25
Stock the corner
One anchor post’s consumables for a full night: the water cases, the first-aid restock, the witness-connect cards. Small mercies, pre-paid.
$100
One Mother’s full stipended shift
The hero unit. A full shift of experienced presence on a downtown corner, stipended at $100 — stated plainly, paid by the book. For scale: about what one hour of one extra-duty officer costs.
$250
One Mother’s whole weekend
Both nights stipended ($200) plus the corner’s water and supplies she hands out ($50). Friday and Saturday, covered by you.
$1,000
One Mother, one month, all-in
Her stipends for the month (3–4 shifts, $300–$400) plus her true share of kit, training, insurance, and evaluation (≈$690) — computes to ≈$1,090; the last slice rides on the sponsor lines. One experienced Mother, on the street, for a month.
$7,500
Put the marigold on the street
Underwrites nearly the entire uniform line — sixty kits, spares included (line $8,000; verified vendor range $5,500–$8,600). In Norway, an insurance company has kept parent night-walkers on the street for three decades. That legacy is unclaimed in Florida. Recognition only: the pledge says zero operational influence, and means it.
Monthly: “The Eleven” — $11 a month
Named for the hour the city clocks out. A year of The Eleven ($132) puts one more fully stipended Mother-shift on the street, with the corner’s water thrown in. Steady monthly gifts carry a watch between fund drives — the quiet backbone of every one that lasts.
Many employers match gifts — ask, and your vote counts twice.
Every unit reconciles to the published budget — $100 a shift, 624 shift-slots across 26 weeks at full strength; the larger gifts carry training, insurance, the base, the evaluation. Books published quarterly.
Deductibility, honestly: gifts made through an executed fiscal sponsorship are received by the sponsor — an IRS-determined 501(c)(3) — and deductible as the law allows from day one. The executed papers publish the day they exist; until then we keep saying it exactly this way.
The pledge at the top, restated: the goal is $242,000 — the full-strength six-month pilot. The published floor (≈$198,600 with processing) is the smallest watch we would launch rather than refund. Below it at the hard close, every dollar comes back before another is spent; between floor and goal, we launch at the floor and publish exactly what changed.
What your money will never buy
A surveillance system
No live feeds, no watching software, no database of faces — ever. The cameras stay off for the crowd — and switch on only when violence does; the sealed footage goes to OPD the same night.
A campaign
No candidate, party, or PAC will ever see a cent or a name. The firewall is in the governing documents and in every pledge.
And what it does buy, said honestly: stipended expertise
The Mothers are not paid a wage and not hired as security. They are stipended $100 a shift — recognition that experience has value and that coming downtown costs money. It is real compensation, treated that way: reported and paid by the book through the fiscal sponsor, capped at 3–4 shifts a month, printed in the published budget for anyone to check.
Where this is headed
First the citizens. Then the handshake.
The pilot’s first year is funded by the people who love this city after dark — not by City Hall. All OMW asks of the city in year one is the 11 PM handshake: Ambassadors clock out, Mothers clock in. The ledger on this page is the argument, and you are its author.