Where Your Donation Goes

The All-Volunteer Baseline

Steampunk Farms Rescue Barn is an all-volunteer organization. No officer, director, or staff member draws a paycheck. That fact is reflected on every IRS Form 990-EZ we’ve filed since 2018 and is publicly searchable under our EIN, 82-4897930.

What this means practically: when you donate $100, none of it pays the rescuers. It pays for feed, hay, vet visits, medication, transport, infrastructure, insurance, and the compliance work that keeps the sanctuary legal. The labor is donated; the supplies aren’t.

The same staffing posture means our overhead profile looks different from most charities of our size. Most of what other nonprofits spend on management and fundraising salaries, we don’t spend on anything. The dollars show up downstream — where the animals are.

A $50 Donation, Walked Through

A real $50 donation lands somewhere specific. There’s no general pool that absorbs it; the bookkeeping ties each gift to the category it funds. Pick any of these and the math works out:

• One 50-lb mineral salt-lick block ($15) for the goat herd, plus about a week of layer pellets ($35) for the chicken flock. The salt lick lasts the herd roughly six weeks; K’roo, our goat ambassador, oversees distribution from her cart.
• One veterinarian farm-call ($50–$120 depending on travel). The base call is fully covered. Anything diagnostic on top — lab work, ultrasound, rads — is itemized on top of that. A $50 donation covers the rural-call portion outright.
• Two 40-lb bags of senior equine pellets ($28 each, plus tax). Smokey, our senior donkey, runs through one bag in about ten days. We tested 11 brands before finding the one his teeth and metabolism tolerate. $50 buys him two weeks of breakfast.
• A round of dewormer for the small-ruminant section ($40–$55) covering goats and sheep on a rotation. We deworm on fecal-egg-count evidence rather than calendar; $50 covers a typical six-month round.

A Monthly Recurring Donation

Recurring donors are the financial spine of small sanctuaries. The reason is not romantic. It is operational: feed bills, vet retainers, and insurance premiums recur on a calendar. Income that recurs on the same cadence lets us plan instead of scrambling.

What a recurring donation buys, by tier:

• $15/month. Daily feed for one small animal — a goat, a rabbit, or a flock member. A year of $15-a-month covers a layer hen’s pellets, bedding, and routine care end-to-end.
• $40/month. Feed, bedding, enrichment, and routine vet care for one resident. This is the tier that maps onto a single sponsored animal. Twelve months of $40 contributions cover what a goat or pig costs us annually to keep happy and healthy.
• $100/month. Complete care including emergency vet coverage, specialized diet, and physical therapy when needed. This tier funds one resident with margin for the things sanctuaries don’t budget for and always have to cover anyway: emergencies, chronic conditions, the three-in-the-morning vet calls.

Recurring donations compound. A new $40-a-month donor joining today commits, by year five, to about $2,400 of accumulated direct animal care. Multiply by the number of donors making the same commitment and you have the year over year of feed budget. That’s the math behind long-term sanctuaries.

A Sponsorship, Walked Through

A sponsorship is a recurring donation explicitly tied to a named resident. The money still goes into the general animal-care fund — we don’t maintain separate bank accounts per pig — but the tie is real. Each sponsorship is logged against the resident, the resident gets a sponsor card on their profile, and the sponsor gets updates as the animal’s story progresses.

For some residents, the math is concrete enough to name:

• Smokey, senior donkey. $40/month covers his senior equine pellets ($28-ish per 40-lb bag, three bags per month) with the remainder reserved for his quarterly farrier visit and routine dental.
• K’roo, goat ambassador. $15/month covers her share of the herd’s daily ration plus a per-animal share of the seasonal hay budget.
• Jute, geriatric pot-belly pig. $100/month covers Jute’s diet (custom joint-supportive feed), his ongoing chiropractic sessions (every six weeks since his joint deterioration was diagnosed), and the meloxicam-class anti-inflammatory we keep him on continuously.

Where the Rest of It Goes

Feed and vet care are the visible budget. The invisible budget is what keeps the sanctuary legal and operational. We name it here because the alternative is hiding it, and we don’t hide it.

• Insurance. General liability, equine and livestock coverage, property — the minimum-viable insurance posture for a working farmed-animal facility. This is a recurring annual premium in the low-thousands, paid in full.
• Infrastructure repair. Fences fail. Water lines freeze. Roofs leak. Hay loft hardware breaks. We budget annually for predictable infrastructure decay and we cover the unpredictable from a reserve fund that the operating budget feeds into a percentage at a time.
• Compliance. Annual filings, state charity registration, tax preparation, board meeting minutes, the document-management infrastructure that keeps all of it organized. Not glamorous; not optional.
• Transport and intake. Trucks, trailers, fuel, and the time it takes to drive to a rural auction and bring an animal home. A single auction-rescue run-out is typically $250–$400 in fuel, fees, and tolls.
• Reserves. A small share of every donation feeds a winter / wildfire reserve so we can keep operating through a power-shutoff or evacuation without scrambling for emergency appeals.

What We Intentionally Don’t Spend On

The line items below are common in the nonprofit world and deliberately absent from our budget. Each absence is a choice, not an oversight.

• Executive salaries. We don’t pay them. We don’t have them. This is the single biggest structural difference between us and most charities of comparable size.
• Fundraising consultants. No external fundraising firm takes a percentage of your gift before it reaches the animals. The donate page is built and maintained by the same volunteers who feed the animals.
• Marketing agencies. Our communications are produced in-house, by people who are also doing evening feed and morning water buckets. The voice you read is ours.
• Paid acquisition. We don’t buy ads or pay for placement. Reach grows organically through the work itself.
• Premium event production. No galas, no catered fundraisers, no high-end venue costs. When we gather donors, we gather them at the sanctuary, where the animals are.

Each of these decisions is a tradeoff. Charities that hire executive directors raise more money on average. Charities that retain fundraising firms scale faster. We’ve chosen the version where the per-dollar outcome is what we optimize, not the gross.

How to Verify Any of This

None of the claims on this page are unverifiable. The filings that back them up live at /the-fine-print, downloadable directly:

• IRS Form 990-EZ for tax years 2020 through 2024 confirms the all-volunteer claim (zero officer / director / key-employee compensation across all filings).
• California Form 199 filings for the same years, parallel state-level transparency.
• IRS Letter of Determination establishing 501(c)(3) status in 2018.
• California SOS Articles of Incorporation and Corporate Bylaws, including governance structure.
• Public profiles on Charity Navigator and Candid (GuideStar), linked from /the-fine-print.

If anything on this page doesn’t match what the filings show, the filings are right. Please tell us.