2016 in Review: Better, Faster, Stronger. Still No Daft Punk.

It’s that time of the year again, folks! It’s time for us to publish our latest Annual Report. Wait… Actually, it’s eight months earlier than that time of the year. What the dust?

Here’s the deal: For the last two years we have published our Annual Report, the yearly recap of what Burning Man project is up to on playa and around the world, at the end of the year after the one covered by the report. This report has been a great opportunity to step back from our little piece of the magic and see what the rest of the community is doing, and how Burning Man Project is helping to stoke those fires. But honestly? It comes a little late.

If you’re anything like us, by December you’re more likely to be thinking about plans for the next year than curious about all the awesomeness from a year ago. We get it. So because of that (and because, frankly, we’re starting to get the hang of this nonprofit thing), we’re going to aim for publishing our Annual Report much earlier in the year, starting today.

The 2016 Annual Report

Our Annual Report is the in-depth look at what Burning Man Project is up to. It includes summaries of our active programs, including: Black Rock City, Art and Civic Engagement, Education, the Philosophical Center, the Global Network and Fly Ranch. The report also includes sections about Gifting and our organizational backbone that support all the nuts-and-bolts activities that make this unexpected, impractical, and persistently meaningful thing called Burning Man happen.

Want to understand what Burning Man Project is doing and where we’re going? This is the place to find — and then share — that information.

Some of 2016’s highlights:

• Black Rock City rose from the dust once again, this year with with 67,290 participants, 1,359 placed camps, and over $1.2 million awarded in art grants.
• The Global Network now includes 286 Regional Contacts in 128 Regions helping to produce 65 official Regional Events.
• Fly Ranch has been purchased to serve as a 3,800 acre site for year-round Ten Principles-based experimentation.
• Burners Without Borders coordinated and supported volunteer efforts in Louisiana, Nepal, North Dakota, and other locations around the world.
• Our Global Arts Grants program awarded funding to 17 global arts projects, including the Reno Art Park and The Appalachian Puppet Pageant in East Tennessee.

Why No 990?

We’re happy that we can publish the 2016 Annual Report less than 10 weeks from the conclusion of the year, but the downside here is that we can’t include the IRS Form 990 with it. Yet.

For those of you that have been playing along at home, the 990 is the equivalent of our organization’s tax return. This super-sexy 60-some pages of tax forms is not available for us to publish until the fall of each year for the year prior, but we didn’t want this process to hold us up from sharing some of the cool stuff we’ve been up to in the last year.

Come fall, we’ll be not only publishing the 990 in its entirely on our website, we’ll also create some fun tools for folks to dive into the numbers to help them understand the finances of Burning Man Project. Need to soothe your digit fix? You can always find the records of our previous 990s on the Public Documents section of our website, and our most recent expenses detailed on this handy pie chart.

So there you go. 2016 is in the books.