As most of you know by now, we’re moving the ERI headquarters from Fresno to Charlotte, North Carolina in a few weeks! I’m speaking in Virginia this week and getting back just in time to help pack the truck and we’ll caravan to Charlotte for five days!

One of the most frequent questions I get these days is: “Why did you pick Charlotte?” Once I knew that it was time to move, I asked my wife Hannah to start researching good airport cities with good cost of living. After ruling out a few options for various reasons, Charlotte became the obvious choice.

It’s ideally located on the east coast, within driving distance of Operations Coordinator Jacob Nels, who lives north of Atlanta, and also a cheap flight away from D.C. where we speak often. The Charlotte airport has direct flights to lots of the places we go.

There are lots of wonderful Christian organizations in the Charlotte area, but no pro-life organizations that are similar to us. We have lots of outreach to do on the college campuses in NC!

We’re going to be so much more efficient by being in Charlotte, and we can’t wait to get there and set up our new office! But as you can imagine, moving is a fairly expensive process. I’m wondering if you’d be willing to help us. All told the move will cost us around $7,412 in transportation costs, including the moving truck.

If you’d like to help, click the button below, and then click on the “Donate Now” button on the webpage it opens. In the third step of the process, you’ll be asked where you’d like to designate your gift. The last option on the dropdown menu is “The ERI Move.” Select that and set up your gift.

Thanks so much! We have huge things coming up, and I’m ready to get this move behind us so we can get back to spending all of our time training pro-life advocates to think clearly, reason honestly, and argue persuasively.

This month marks the two-year anniversary of the launch of Equal Rights Institute. I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve accomplished.

We spoke to 1,455 people in 18 speeches and seven all-day seminars. We published 35 new articles to our blog, which were ready by 38,269 people, mainly visiting our site from America, Russia, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, and Australia!

Here are a few of my favorite memories from the last year:

Successfully shooting 31 videos for our online course in three days.

Students for Life of America has decided to honor me and nine other pro-life Millennial leaders with a Defender of Life award at their conferences this month.

This means a lot to me, as I see Students for Life as being one of the most effective pro-life organizations in the country. To be on the same list as so many other young leaders who are making a huge impact is also humbling.

But mainly, this is really encouraging to me because it tells me that we are helping people. We started ERI to create more opportunities to help pro-lifers learn to be more gracious and persuasive, and I’m really thankful for the success with which God has blessed us. Thank you so much for faithfully supporting us and making this mission possible.

I created this list using the Google Analytics for the ERI blog, instead of complicating the process by incorporating stats from LifeNews.com, where many of our articles are later republished.

Our blog received 79,000 unique pageviews from more than 43,000 unique people this year. That’s a 140% increase in readers from last year.

After running our first reader survey this year, we decided to post more consistently, maintain a calm, respectful, yet uncompromising tone, keep things practical, and keep using stories to model the kinds of dialogues we want people to have. I think we accomplished all of those goals, and we saw great growth to our blog this year.

On to the list!

#5: Avoiding an Embarrassingly Common Pro-Life Mistake

Our mission is to train pro-life advocates to think clearly, reason honestly, and argue persuasively. We want to help the pro-life movement to make the kinds of arguments that are compelling to pro-choice people. We also want to help pro-life people to avoid common pitfalls, and this post is an example of that.

It was interesting to see some people respond to this piece by claiming that pro-lifers don’t make this mistake while at the same time reading comments from readers saying that they’ve been making this mistake for years and had no idea they were committing a logical fallacy.