Funding the Community Arts

This past week put me several posts off of my writing goals, but the procrastination was for a good cause. With TEDx Bloomington just over one month away, I finally got the companion events—Wisdom of Play—initiated.

The Wisdom of Play is a suite of community engagement activities taking place in May 2011. These projects are designed around the theme being used by our TEDx event and include geocaching, storytelling, art and an alternate reality game. We are trying to raise at least $2000 to cover the material costs using Kickstarter, a grass-roots micro-donation campaign site being used to fund interesting creative projects all over the world.

Our campaign will only last through the end of April, so we need to reach our goal by then or—under Kickstarter rules—cancel the project. More likely, it will mean scaling back many of the planned aspects of most of these activities, but some may be in jeopardy without some financial support.

There are some interesting rewards we have come up with to thank our backers for their financial contributions. These include:

• At least $29—A DVD documenting all of the projects and their outcomes.
• At least $59—A shirt from one of the Human Puzzles
• At least $99—A framed section of the story from Our Infinite Canvas
• At least $129—Personal branding for you or your organization in six projects
• At least $199—One of the toy boxes used in our geocaching game

There is also a single super-backer opportunity for $500 that will get all of those rewards plus the ability to influence where three of our projects will be located.

Ideally, this fundraising would have taken place in February, but circumstances didn’t work out to allow that to happen. We have a campaign now, through the end of this month. Less than $100 a day from the community will get us to our goal. More than that, and maybe we can get a blimp.

Check out the new video on our Kickstarter page and consider giving something to the cause.