Frequently Asked Questions

We will not make it to the next cycle of building Black Rock City without a financial bridge to get us there. This crisis is real and we need your help.

Our number one priority is to bring back Black Rock City in the future. This community campaign will help retain irreplaceable staff with critical institutional knowledge, ensure we maintain important infrastructure, and more.

Sure is. Building Black Rock City is an incredibly complicated, expensive and time-consuming endeavor. If we’re not able to weather the COVID-19 fallout and retain irreplaceable staff who have critical institutional knowledge about how to do it, it will be extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to rebuild BRC again.

It is a lot of money! It’s also not everything we need to save Burning Man. We’re aiming to raise $12 million to get us to ticket sales season in the spring, and this campaign is meant to engage our broader community who want to help us get back to Black Rock City however they can. Check out this page for more context on how this campaign fits into our current financial situation

• Retention of critical staff who are working hard to bring Black Rock City back, more inclusive and more sustainable than ever before.
• Maintenance of key infrastructure, especially our heavy equipment, needed to produce the event and support artists and art projects.
• Ensuring the health and safety for our city, including consulting with epidemiologists, virologists, and medical practitioners to stay in front of best practices to help us gather safely in this new reality.

Facilitating a global cultural movement takes year-round engagement. We’ve built a world class staff with deep institutional knowledge over many, many years, and they’re hard at work preparing to bring back Black Rock City while advancing other key initiatives, including:

• Sustainability, inclusivity and efficiency. We’re moving the sustainability roadmap forward faster, we’re working with community leaders to become more radically inclusive both on—and off—playa, and we’re implementing a new strategy to produce the event more cost effectively.
• Nurturing our volunteer base and preserving Burning Man’s cultural ecosystem, including Burners Without Borders, Kindling, the Regional Network, and the Multiverses.
• Maintaining Fly Ranch and our other Northern Nevada properties, which provide infrastructural support for Black Rock City and must be maintained throughout the year.
• Continuing our work with the Bureau of Land Management, Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, Washoe and Pershing Counties, Nevada Department of Health and Human Services as well as the citizens of Gerlach and Empire on permitting, event operations, stewardship, and economic development.
• For more about what we’re up to in a year without Black Rock City, please see this post on the Burning Man Journal.

Your donation is tax-deductible to the fullest extent allowable by law.

The easiest way to make your gift to the Save Black Rock City community campaign is using your credit card or PayPal. This includes international donors. If you prefer to make your gift by check, wire transfer, stock, or cryptocurrency, please contact the Philanthropic Engagement team at giving@burningman.org.

Members of our community have generously stepped up to host their own community campaign page to collect donations from their campmates, crew members, friends and family. All donations made to those campaigns are funneled into the main campaign.

First off, thank you so much for your generosity during the 2020 ticket season! Your contributions have helped us keep the lights on over the last few months, and we appreciate you deeply. We are now setting our sights on getting through the rest of the year and, hopefully, bringing Black Rock City back to the desert in 2021. If you’re able to give again and support us in this endeavor, please do! You’ll also help us by sharing this need with your friends and community. It’s an effort of many that will help us succeed.

We get it. We’ve had to make some very hard choices over the last few months — including salary cuts, reductions in seasonal and year-round staff, and slashing expenses — and we know that many of you are going through similar challenges in your own lives. If you can’t afford to donate, there are other ways to help. Please share this campaign with your community, family and friends so we can get the word out. Larger companies sometimes offer a nonprofit donation matching program … check that out? Maybe consider organizing a fundraiser with your camp? Our hope is that each and every member of our community will participate in some way to help Burning Man survive this challenging and yet transformational year.

We hope you enjoy these flashbacks and references to our unique culture and the experiences many people share in Black Rock City. To be extra clear — since this is the FAQ after all — no, we are not planning to ship you an old jalopy or facilitate a grilled cheese sandwich showing up under glass in deep playa. But honestly, now that the possibility is out there, who knows? Weirder things have happened. And as with all things at Burning Man, you are responsible for the fulfillment of your own experience … just saying.