This is not a decision that we take lightly, but it’s one that needs to be taken.

FurPenn, in its current state, is unlikely to take place on the original estimated date of 2021, and as such, we currently are going to consider it cancelled for the time being, but this is by no means permanent. More on that later.

There are several reasons why we make this decision, the main one being myself moving out of the state of Pennsylvania. It is very difficult to organize a convention and have a venue contract when the person who would be signing that contract is not even able to physically be at the venue. While, yes, it is possible to coordinate with the venue from afar, it does not make me comfortable to communicate with venues when I cannot be physically present at said venue, especially when I have no prior relationship with said venues. Other reasons for this decision includes the fact that many of our potential staff for year 1 are either out of state themselves, or live in the far extremes of Pennsylvania, hours away from State College, making things just that much more difficult.

There isn’t a huge demand for a central PA furry con, in fact, most are completely satisfied with Anthrocon especially considering it calls the Keystone state its home. That doesn’t mean we don’t think it should happen, and it definitely doesn’t mean we’re quitting. We would still like to see a State College furry convention at least in the 2020s. Due to other board ventures, the various sites we host, the various servers we own and maintain, the plethora of mail server users and aliases, we estimated that we would not be able to hold FurPenn’s first year until at least 2021. With these extra struggles, we will almost certainly be unable to hold FurPenn in 2021. We will continue to loosely plan for an event, but we don’t see it happening with our board until at least the mid 2020s, which is a long way away. If, in that time, another organization takes the initiative, we’d be happy to redirect the domain to them and support them in any way we can. If this doesn’t happen, we’ll try to make it happen and will pickup where we left off. This is why we are currently only considering FurPenn cancelled for the time being. We’re still confident that given enough time, we could pull this event off.

The furpenn.org domain will remain renewed for the foreseeable future, and the NotFurProfit organization will continue on with its other ventures.

-Frost, NotFurProfit Chairman