Disclaimer: I am part of the team trying to raise funds for this project. And while I hope you will donate to our project, I also want to share information about how Kickstarter is an interesting new way that people can use to raise funds for cool ideas.
There are plenty of great ideas in the world. The challenge is to find ways to fund them. We’re using Kickstarter to get us started (click here to see what we mean).
A group of us at Michigan State University are fascinated by the project during the Great Depression called America Eats, whose mission was to tell stories about people in groups across America and their foodways. The federal Works Progress Administration funded the initiative, hiring famous authors including Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty. The goal was to capture great stories and photographs about people and their food, while also providing employment to creative people who were struggling during tough times.
This image of a homesteading family during the Great Depression in Pie Cut, AZ, is from the Library of Congress collection
We want to re-invent the project for our times as America Eats Today. Our plan is to use online multimedia to tell the stories of people in groups today, starting with the Midwest. We plan to produce multimedia packages including articles by famous writers and mini-documentary films to tell stories that range from the new breed of young farmers selling at farmers markets to a wildlife biologist who is re-introducing ancient ways of cooking to Native Americans to how people “hunt” for things to eat in the food deserts of urban areas. We also want to digitize those four boxes of materials at the Library of Congress, to share the past with people today through a permanent online archive.
Producing the multimedia packages requires significant funding, and we plan to approach the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding. But we are eager to get started now, so we are experimenting with using Kickstarter as a way to fund Dr. Veit for a trip to Washington to peek into those boxes and start digitizing. We are intrigued by the possibility of using “crowdsourcing” to gather information about what we find and post. Crowdsourcing is the term applied to engaging people worldwide through the Web to share what they know.
Kickstarter allows us to tap dozens (we hope) of potential donors nationwide who might be willing to give us at least a small amount of money to help make this dream a reality. It is an all-or-nothing proposition. We figure it will cost $1,500 for Helen’s trip to D.C., and if we do not reach our goal by Sunday, September 25, at 11:20 a.m., we get nothing. Kickstarter provides us the platform for our outreach, and we do whatever we can to urge people to go there.
So not only is this a pitch for you to help us with our project, but it is also a way to share this new online fund-raising concept with others who have great ideas they want to turn into reality. It takes a bit of work to put together the package – writing the text, creating a video, developing a reward system (we created what we think is a cool logo we can put on tote bags and t-shirts to reward our donors). But preparing the package required to apply for a slot also helps focus the idea and turn it into a concrete plan.
A number of musician friends have been successful using Kickstarter. Michigan folk musicians Seth and May used Kickstarter to raise funds to go to Ethiopia to record an album. Lansing artists Brandon and Bethany Foote were successful in raising the funds for their debut album Gifts or Creatures.
Now researchers at universities nationwide are jumping on the Kickstarter bandwagon, according to an article in the New York Times. We will keep you posted about our progress.
