The Den is a non-profit website. It does not charge any fees for membership or contest entry, nor does it assail it's patrons with advertisements. As a result, it can not get by without a little help from it's friends, or in this case; members.

There are a few ways you can help, and we appreciate any help you can give.

Donations
This is fairly straightforward, simply use paypal to send in a donation of any amount. Even $5 goes a long way. The Den currently costs about $200/year to administer, which means if every member donated $5, our costs would be covered after only 40 donations.

The Den's Member Gear
Here's the deal. CafePress creates the gear as you order it, and charge a defined cost per item. The Den adds a 10% markup on the item cost for a donation towards contest prizes and operating costs. So a $10 item will cost $11 dollars, or a $20 item will cost $22 dollars, and so on. CafePress sends you the gear, and you help your peers... simple right? Visit the store today and see if anything suits your fancy.

Lend A Hand
The Den of Amateur Writing is a non-profit, user contribution driven website that runs because members and founders put time into keeping it going. Their spare time. Since spare time fluctuates it is always important to keep enough staff members on hand to keep the site functional and interesting for members. If you think you can lend a hand, please contact us to indicate your interest.

Join The Den of Amateur Writing's Folding@Home Team
Protein folding is a fundamental function of biology. It is required in order for a protein to be able to do it's job. However sometimes proteins misfold, and this is believed to cause several known diseases. Those diseases include Alzheimers, cystic fibrosis, Mad Cow, an inherited form of emphysema, and many forms of cancer. As a result nearly everyone on The Den knows someone affected by one of these diseases, either a family member or friend. It would take 30 years for the worlds fastest supercomputer to simulate and calculate a complete protein fold. This is something which only takes 10,000 nanoseconds to occur in real life! Thus it would take years for us to ever get anywhere in dicovering the true cause of these diseases. In order to help this, Stanford University started the Folding@Home project. By having thousands of computers work together across the globe, each processing small chunks of data for a complete simulation, the work for each fold can be completed in days rather than years. This allows science to work faster towards a cure, and has already lead to some exciting breakthroughs. Join the Folding@Home project and use your PC, Mac or PS3 to help The Den contribute in the search for a cure.