Crowd funding for Native projects

Michael Cooke continues the debate begun in Rob Should Fight Poverty?! and Educational Value of Blogging and sidetracked in Whites Fighting Racism Are Racist?!Now, what you have are computer and writing skills. Those are tremendously powerful tools for change, that can make a difference.

So here's my invitation. Talk to some of your native American friends and create a project that will make a huge difference to native American people if it simply has the funding. The right project will not require an insane amount of money, and it will be inspiring the amount of change it can accomplish.

Once you have that project, go to my blog, this post: http://kitschchaos.com/blog/?s=crowd+funding and select a crowd funding solution you feel is the best fit for the project. This will involve writing about the project and enrolling people into contributing money to see the project fulfilled. It works beautifully especially if you really allow contributors to read your blog to see how the project is getting done and let them feel like they are really part of the success of the project.

This plays to your strengths, you can accomplish a lot. Just DO IT!Mike's posting on crowd funding explains the basic idea and lists several sites, including:

http://www.kickstarter.com
http://www.quirky.com
http://www.indiegogo.com

I believe Norman Patrick Brown used Kickstarter to raise $15,000 to complete Rainbow Boy. So the idea can work.

I'm all in favor of this approach. I've heard good things about microlending--where NGOs give small loans to budding entrepreneurs in developing countries. Although you raise the money yourself and it isn't a loan, this is kind of the same idea. I.e., harnessing small amounts of money to get worthy projects underway.

Mike probably thinks I should use my computer and writing skills plus his crowd-funding idea to fight poverty. There's where we disagree. If I were to use crowd funding, it would be in the same fields I'm working in now: education and the arts.

Why? Again, because education is a long-term solution for social problems such as poverty. Creating educated Native leaders and professionals means empowering them to solve their own problems. It's the old "teach a person to fish" mentality that Mike can't refute or even address.

When I have a brilliant idea for which crowd funding might help, I'll consider pursuing it. Until then, I'll do what I do best. Namely, sharing the idea with those who can benefit from it now. Like a teacher or librarian, I'll empower them with the information. Then they can go forth and change the world.