It’s almost July! We hope you all are healthy and safe. Our Ballroom continues to be silent, awaiting the day we can all dance in person again! We, the Board, have been busy behind the scenes working on plans to ensure that the Austin Swing Syndicate survives the current pandemic. We look forward to hearing from Public Health Authorities about when it will be safe to gather and dance. In the meantime, we hope you are tuning in to the numerous online classes and musical performances. We are building a library of fun tutorials for our website too!

We want to thank our community members who have been donating to us! It warms our hearts to see these donations coming in, and we are excited to announce a new opportunity to support our organization. We’ve had our thinking caps on, and we have come up with a great plan. We will need YOUR help.

We are an Arts Organization. And we are so proud to say that we have been self-sustaining all these years. That is extremely rare for an Arts Organization. We have actually paid our own way. That shows that there is and has been an ongoing desire for this organization to exist. The COVID-19 crisis is a huge challenge, but we believe we can survive. We are uniquely positioned to survive this pandemic. We fear that the worldwide Swing community may permanently lose many events and perhaps even many smaller communities. But the Austin Swing Syndicate can survive and become a future beacon, lighting the way back.

We are establishing a new level of membership. The Sustaining Member. This membership costs $250 per year. Benefits of this level of membership include free admission every Thursday, including Live Music Nights. You also get a special membership card, three admission cards to give away, a Syndicate T-shirt, and a Syndicate sticker. These membership dues are tax deductible as well. Obviously, during COVID-19, we are not dancing. Therefore, during this time, the Sustaining Membership revenue will be vital to meeting our contractual obligations such as rent. We are looking for 250 people to become Sustaining Members. During normal operations, that will allow us to know that our most basic expenses of rent and staff are covered all year.

Please consider joining the Austin Swing Syndicate as a Sustaining Member. You can sign up today in our online store.

We miss you. We thank you for your support, and we can’t wait to see your faces once we can safely return.

– The Austin Swing Syndicate Board

June 25, 2020/by Jennifer Reed