Posts from crowdfunding

This animated short film project showed up in my Kickstarter feed this week and I backed it right away. It’s about kids learning to love who they are. It is a message that we all need to hear right now.

Ameelio is a nonprofit tech company seeking to break the prison communications monopolies and provide free communication solutions for prisoners and their friends and families. They have a Kickstarter project up right now and I backed it today.

My partner Nick blogged about this Kickstarter project yesterday and I immediately backed it.

Second Chance Studio is a nonprofit digital media company that trains and employs formerly incarcerated individuals.

You can back their Kickstarter project here.

I wrote about this project to financially support people who were laid off because of the Covid pandemic back in early April. We also participated in the project and supported a family in the NY metro area back then.

I saw this tweet yesterday:

$1mm in funding, almost 350 families supported, in ten weeks. That’s terrific.

If you want to participate, you do so here.

I am a big fan of pairing solar panels on the roof with a battery system in the garage. The battery allows you to use the solar power at night when there is no sun. It also provides resilience for power outages and the like.

So when I saw this Kickstarter project, I backed it immediately.

The premise is simple enough. Find a battery pack out of a wrecked hybrid or EV vehicle at a junkyard and using simple off the shelf tools and materials convert it into a battery system capable of being charged from a variety of sources (solar, wind, grid, water, etc) and power a house’s basic necessities during the midst of a crisis or during times when power is more expensive (during the day) while replenishing when power is either abundant or cheaper, like at night. While this information is available currently, most of whats out there is long, wordy, confusing and in some cases conflicting.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/khohnholz/homebrew-tesla-powerwall-clone

I went for the $20 pledge which comes with a complete users guide.

Now I need to find a “wrecked EV.” This should be a fun project.

So many of our favorite community anchors have shuttered in the wake of the pandemic. And reopening them won’t be easy.

Music venues, movie theaters, art galleries, restaurants, performance spaces, maker spaces, conferences, festivals, and bookshops are the places we hang out in, enjoy each other, and and connect to art and culture.

But these spaces also have communities of people connected to them, rooting for them, and eager to help them.

Enter Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform for bringing creative projects to life (and a USV portfolio company).

Kickstarter is not charity, although there is certainly a need for charity in this moment. Kickstarter is a platform to engage your community, reward them, and encourage them to support your work.

A few weeks ago, Kickstarter launched Lights On, a call for projects that “sustain your cultural space, event series, creative organization, or independent business”.

If you own or operate a cultural space, a local beloved business, an event series, or some other community treasure and want to engage your community in your reopening plan, Kickstarter Lights On is for you.

You can learn more about it here.

Yesterday, Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef/owner/creator of Prune, a tiny twenty-year-old restaurant in the east village that The Gotham Gal and I and our family have always loved, wrote a piece in the New York Times that really captures the sense of loss we all feel around our favorite local places, particularly for the people who made them what they are every day, day after day, year after year.

I can’t get her words and the images and emotions they convey out of my head.

So I want this Funding Friday to be for people like her, who have given a large part of who they are to serving us.

And the cause I’ve selected is ROAR, Relief Opportunities for All Restaurants. You can follow them here:

ROAR’s Twitter

ROAR’s Instagram

ROAR and Robin Hood, one of NYC’s leading charitable organizations, are partnering with the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF) to provide direct cash assistance to restaurant workers in New York City facing unprecedented economic hardship as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We made a donation today and if you’d like to join us, you can do that here.

We continue to be concerned about the most vulnerable among us and that is where we want to focus our giving right now.

To that end, Give Directly has a NYC Covid Fund that will give funds directly to people. Specifically:

GiveDirectly is delivering cash to families enrolled in SNAP (a federal nutrition assistance program) and living in the local ZIP codes most affected by COVID-19. Most recipients are single mothers. Each will receive $1K.

https://www.givedirectly.org/covid-19/nyc/

I made a personal donation to this today and I know of a number of other significant contributions to this fund by others.

If you want to support it, you can do so here.

As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the US, the people who are stepping up the most to meet this challenge are our country’s healthcare workers. We should do everything we can to help make sure they can work safely during this crisis.

So today I am highlighting two fundraisers for protective equipment for these health care workers. Both are on GoFundMe (which happens to be a USV portfolio company but that is just a coincidence here). I have given to both of them.

A Million Masks For NYC – This one was started by a bunch of folks in the NYC tech sector and has raised from individuals (like me) and NYC tech companies. You can give here.

Frontline Responders Fund – This is a $10mm campaign started by Edward Norton and the logistics company Flexport to fund supplying “masks, gowns, gloves and other critical supplies to protect medical professionals in hospitals across the world.” You can give here.