The League of Fan Funds

The League of Fan Funds is an umbrella organisation that raises money, mostly at UK science fiction conventions, for various fan funds, and disburses it to them. It is currently administered by Claire Brialey, Alison Scott, Ang Rosin and Flick.

It is not a charity and is not formally constituted.

What We Do

We hold auctions and other fundraising events at UK SF conventions.
We give the money raised to various fannish 'good causes', split between them as we see fit.
We can disburse surpluses from conventions or other fannish activity if you want to give them to fan funds but aren't sure who needs the money right now.

What We Don't Do

We are not a charity; some of the things we raise money for are charitable but not all. If you want to give money to a good science fictional charity in the UK, try the Science Fiction Foundation.

Why We Do This

The predecessors to LFF came about because several different funds were trying to raise money at the main UK cons all at once, and the organisers of the cons were getting fed up with being asked to put on multiple different fan fund auctions. Instead, they decided to have a united auction. For some years it just ran in an informal way; we ran the auction, we dished out the money. Later we formalised this, and later still we changed the name to the League of Fan Funds.

Who We Are

The LFF is administered by three or four science fiction fans who've been around a while, are trusted to look after a pool of other people's money and should be able to make sensible decisions about where the cash should go. At present the administrators are Claire Brialey, Alison Scott, Ang Rosin and Flick.

Can we see your accounts?

Yes, we publish them regularly, in the LFF newsletter, which is usually produced for Eastercon. It's typically a couple of thousand pounds a year; it's not audited but if you want to talk about the money in more detail we can do that.

What about the Mexicon Hat?

The Mexicon Hat originally gave seed capital in the form of loans to fannish projects. Their original constitution said that if there wasn't a demand for this, they would wind it up and give the money to fan funds. It turned out that there wasn't much demand; so they gave us the money, and we disbursed the remaining funds last year.

However, as a result, we believe that making smallish interest-free loans to kickstart specific projects for the benefit of fandom as a whole is within our remit.

How Can I Help?

There are a few ways that you can help out with the work of LFF.

Probably the most important is that we need people to store material between conventions and transport it to and from. Many thanks to Noel Collyer, Mike Scott and Mark Plummer, who have been doing this already.

The second is that you can bring things that you own but don't want to conventions for us to auction. Don't bring perishables (except sweets) or things that nobody could conceivably want, and don't spend much money buying things for auction (donate instead). Check the website with us first to see whether there's going to be an LFF auction at a particular con!

We'll always take money, but consider just donating it to the fannish good cause of your choice instead: we don't actually do things ourselves, we just distribute money to those who do.