We have some news that we wouldn’t call good – but it is still somewhat of a relief.
2026 was the last year for the Multiverse FunRaiser.
If you read our last post in this series, you saw that we are majorly re-evaluating how much time we have, and wanting to spend time doing fewer things, but getting better at them. We don’t want to be stretched thin and underperforming.
So, we made an incredibly difficult decision. We are closing the virtual doors of the Multiverse FunRaiser.
Don’t be sad though! (We are, but we’re trying not to be, and you should too.)
The Multiverse FunRaiser, a weekend-long virtual convention that we ran for 4 years (and for two years before that under a different name), did some really great things.
In 2022, we supported actress Valerie Perrine, raising funds for her Parkinson’s treatment.
This event covered developments in indie publishing across comics and various other arts, had Q&As with several celebrities, and discussed cosplay in depth. Attendees had fun all over the United States. Because, like every year, we weren’t just raising funds for a good cause. We were raising FUN.
We were directing people to an existing GoFundMe campaign, so the exact numbers were hard to track, but we raised roughly $1,000 just in the weekend of that event. We encouraged people to continue donating over the years.
To this day, the GoFundMe for Valerie raised over $95,000 to keep Valerie Perrine more comfortable, and people continued donating until she sadly passed away.
In 2023, we teamed up with the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health.
Every year, Americans are lost to us due to overlooked or misdiagnosed aortic dissection. But more and more people know to ask their doctors and advocate for themselves when faced with potentially deadly aortic disease, thanks to the John Ritter Foundation.
The Multiverse FunRaiser jumped into the fray. We put on our usual, quality content, a free virtual convention. We interviewed celebrities, had voice actors on, hosted special episodes of multiple well-known podcasts, and had tons of audience participation for all of it.
We raised $1,360 for the Foundation that weekend.
And for this issue specifically, we are especially proud of the awareness we helped raise, because knowing what aortic disease is allows patients to direct their doctors to investigate the cause of their illnesses.
Our announcement about the Ritter Foundation, directing people to their site to get information that could potentially save lives was viewed and heard over 4,000 times.
And you can still learn from the Foundation and support them today, here.
In 2024, we began a standing partnership with Comicbooks For Kids.
Comicbooks for Kids is the largest charity in the world that brings comics and other comfort items to children in hospitals and cancer wards.
For three years, we worked closely alongside CB4K’s founder, Mark Weiss.
Our content for the virtual convention leaned more heavily into comic books than before, and took on an additional mission of fostering relationships between comic creators and the charity, so that they could donate any child-friendly issues directly to Comicbooks for Kids.
Many artists and writers learned of their work, and The Art of Brian Rodman sponsored the convention one year, donating over $100 of his comic, The Nebulizer, and lending his brand’s support to raising awareness for this great cause.
- In 2024, we raised over $1,600 and the call-to-action encouraging people to check out the charity was heard over 2,800 times.
- In 2025, the Multiverse FunRasier raised $570 directly to our Facebook fundraiser (with some donations going to to the charity’s PayPal, which we could not track). And, impressively, the call-to-action was heard over 3,000 times across several social media and podcasting platforms.
- Our final year, 2026 was no slump. We raised $1,136 for CB4K. And our reach was still impressive at over 1,900 views, despite our streaming service failing to stream to several of our platforms.
Let’s get some totals gathered up then.
For Comicbooks for Kids, we raised over $3,300, and in terms of awareness, we made sure people were reminded of this amazing charity over 7,700 times.
Overall, the Multiverse raised over $5,600 and our messages raising awareness for these vital causes were heard almost 15,000 times.
Kelly and the MVFR volunteers received multiple awards for their outstanding efforts in support of Comicbooks for Kids.
So we’re saying farewell to this event on a great note.
But our charity work is far from over.
ComicBooks for Kids has a large, annual fundraising event of their own that we’ll be volunteering for.
The Phoenix Sisters are also both members of Costumers with a Cause, with Kelly even being an administrator for the organization.
You can learn more about the great work CWC does here.
So, we’re saying goodbye to the Multiverse FunRaiser with heavy hearts, but as we mentioned before – we’d like to switch from doing pretty well at a lot of things throughout the year to REALLY well at just a few.
To all our past volunteers, we say the biggest thank you.
To all the organizations we’ve worked with, it’s been an honor.
We can’t wait to see what we do next as a team, and we hope you can’t as well.
