that fundraising e-mail...

I remember it used to happen when I was younger. Someone was going on tour with Up with People and needed to raise $10,000. Someone else had gone to work in an underfunded school in an urban area through Teach for America and was writing back to raise money for their much needed school supplies (appalling when you think about it).

More recently, I have always enjoyed buying cookie dough for the New School, taking clothes to and making purchases from the Y Thrift Shop, and making my semi-annual pledge to NPR (usually in more than one city) every year.

Now, I find myself working in the arts, and I feel like I'm fundraising ALL the time. I mean, I am a Development Director in one of my jobs (for Synchronicity Performance Group), but really in my other one, and in my volunteer networks and for the whole field I'm always thinking about the problems we have with funding. And let me tell you folks, as the economy tightens its belt, we out here who depend on grants, corporate sponsorship, individual donors, special events, etc., we're going to be some of the first to suffer. I'm already seeing the signs in some of the work that I do.

So, I've been thinking about it, and, well, I'm a pretty good person. I put as much positive energy out into the universe as I can. As I mentioned before, I support as many nonprofits as the $15,000 I earned last year would allow.

Which is why I've decided to call on my network. I really thought I'd never do something like this, and now that I've let myself start thinking this way, I'm not even going to promise I'll never do it again, but here's the issue du jour...

Many of you know that I've been doing work back in Blacksburg about the shootings at Virginia Tech...HERE:Honoring Experiences, Reflections, and Expressions. We're working toward having an event on April 13, close to the anniversary on April 16. The event will be a multidisciplinary artists' response. It's shaping up to be a wonderful afternoon of programming, and I'm really looking forward to it. The problem is that we're still fundraising for it. We really want it to be free to the community for obvious reasons, and in a lot of ways, in my opinion, other than just the lag in the economy, fundraising for this kind of activity may be close to tapped out because so many people have been giving to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund (which went to the victims' families) and other very worth causes such as the Red Cross, etc.

So...borrowing from a fabulous idea that we have going at Synchronicity called "Ten Lousy Bucks," which is like "come on just send us $10 of your money and we'll give you ten reasons why you should," I'm calling on the "Friends/Family of Shannon Network" in hopes that you will put a little money (or maybe a little more money?) in an envelope and send it along to Blacksburg. Here we go with, mmm...I can think of 5 reasons this morning why...

• A great deal of the money we're raising for this endeavor directly pays artists to help me make this show happen. We call them "curators" for their individual disciplines (dance curator, film curator, etc.). We all know that artists are not paid well, and as I mentioned before, we could be looking at a time where it's going to get worse.
  
• You would be paying for a time for up to 475 people to be sitting together with their community, not watching TV, driving cars, looking at lascivious material on the internet, or supporting the candidate that you don't want them to.
  
• It's a tax deductible donation, and well, if you make enough money to do that, then you know that's a good thing.
• Have I mentioned that I'll forever be in a state of gratitude to you? I will wash your car when I see you again!
  
• If you don't live in Blacksburg, you may not have had the opportunity to donate yet to the healing there, but probably during the week following thought "gosh, I wish I knew something to do in this situation." Now, here you are almost a year later, and you know exactly what you can do.

So, if I've convinced you, to support HERE, donations will be collected through the Community Foundation’s 4-17 Community Spirit Fund. Please make checks payable to the Community Foundation of the New River Valley, P.O. Box 6009, Christiansburg, VA 24068-6009. I'm also going to attach to this message the more formal fundraising one-pager for you.

I hope you don't mind that I've used you in this way. ;) And, as always, I hope to hear from you as individual people whom I love and miss like crazy.

Cheers,
Shannon