KickStarter is here, and aslong as creative and ambitious entrepreneurs continue to look for funding it’s here to stay. Like any services, there’s all sorts of wonderful projects to support and help fund, and some you can look to avoid. Every month, I’ll be providing a list of projects I’ve seen which look to be worth your time and hard earned coin.
Combat Paper Program
Category: Art
Amount Pledged (as of March 1st): $10,457 of $15,000
Days to Go (as of March 1st): 19
Pledge Range: $10 – $1,000
This KickStarter project will definitely pull on the heart strings, and it’s a creative idea to boot. Started by a gentleman named Dave Keefe, he developed a local area (Branchburg, NJ) project which allows veterans to take army fatigues and recycle them into paper. They can then take this paper and create their own pieces of art.
Combat Paper is a veteran-led program that uses art as a tool to heal. First and foremost, Combat Paper provides a safe and comfortable place where veterans can come together to talk every Sunday. This weekly drop-in session held at a local arts center, uses the ancient art of handmade papermaking to help veterans heal from the physical, psychological and emotional effects of war. Participation is free to all veterans and no registration is necessary. The handmade paper is made out of old combat fatigues. Some vets use their own fatigues and others use uniforms donated by community members. The uniforms are cut into small pieces and beaten into pulp using the art center’s papermaking equipment.
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The Abaddon
Category: Comics
Amount Pledged (as of March 1st): $1,662 of $3,000
Days to Go (as of March 1st): 19
Pledge Range: $5 – $500
As a comic book fan, I’m pretty tough on new projects. There’s only so many “awesome vampire vs. werewolf stories” ideas you can sift through on KickStarter. This project really caught my attention. It looks to be a mind-bending mystery with a very interesting art style, and the project head looks to provide some worthwhile rewards for higher-end backers.
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LowLine: An Underground Park on NYC’s Lower East Side
Category: Design
Amount Pledged (as of March 1st): $68,167 of $100,000
Days to Go (as of March 1st): 36
Pledge Range: $5 – $10,000
In NYC there isn’t a whole lot of green to enjoy. Tall buildings and beautiful lights, yes, but you really have to know where to go to catch a glimpse of nature. Which makes this project worth looking into. They’re utilizing solar technology to turn an abandoned underground trolley line into a park.
Ever wonder why there’s so little green space in New York? There aren’t a lot of empty plots of land just waiting to be turned into new parks. New Yorkers have had to be a little more creative, and must look in unusual places – the High Line, a park built on an old elevated rail trestle, is a great example.
A few years ago, we learned about a massive unused former trolley terminal in our neighborhood, the Lower East Side. We got to thinking: what if we could build a park– underground– even if the space lacked natural sunlight? So we explored using fiber optic cables to transfer sunlight below ground– to support the growth of plants and trees. As we shared this idea with others, people got excited. “An underground High Line for the Lower East Side,” they’d say. “Kind of like… a LowLine.” The nickname stuck.
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The Placebo Chocolate Project
Category: Food
Amount Pledged (as of March 1st): $3,698 of $12,000
Days to Go (as of March 1st): 31
Pledge Range: $1 – $5,000
The simple ideas are generally the best, and what could be more simply than taking chocolate, something we all love and using it to spread messages of love and joy around the world. All the while using natural ingredients…
The Placebo Chocolate Project was originally imagined by a little man who travelled the world in search of a cure to the sadness he felt. When he had all but given up, he ran into a little old woman in Scotland who gave him a “prescription” for love (really it was just words scribbled on a piece of paper). The next day he didn’t feel happy – but he felt love – and he found the strength he needed to keep searching. Almost a year later – after meditating in Spain, volunteering at an orphanage in Guatemala, building a sustainable farm in Argentina, and writing beside painters in Chile – he realized he was so full of love, peace, and happiness that he couldn’t possibly keep it all to himself. He needed to share the ingredients.
On that day, the little man left his little apartment in Peru (he’d fallen in love with a little woman who kept him there while they awaited a fiance Visa to the US), walked down the street, and saw chocolate everywhere – in shops, in restaurants, and on street corners. And he realized that it would be so easy to use chocolate – which everyone in the world loves – to share love, joy, courage, wisdom, and so many other foundational experiences.
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