Back to the MarvelGourd! Challenge

 

In a previous post, we said this year's VA Gourd Show will once again align its member challenge with the current exhibit at our host venue, the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley. The exhibit is Marvelocity: the Art of Alex Ross and our challenge is MarvelGourd! - combining gourds with marveliousness of action figures!  Here are 2 ideas so far:

👈 One idea is a long-necked bottle gourd, hands on hips, head titled back in a proud stance of being Rose. Long-handled dipper gourds will provide the curved limps of arms and legs and paper roses as ornament, rose tattoos as body decoration, and rose fabric as tights and hair clasp.

The other idea is the Super Gourder with the tool belt and a bunch of mini gourd projects, electric cords, paint brushes and tools hanging from a belt wrapped around the belly of a masked bottleneck gourd.👉        

Join us for the VA Gourd Show! It's a great place for holiday gifts, raw gourds for your own projects, and meet experts who can offer some advice! There's always more than one way to make your way around an idea.

Another Luminary - With a Blue Light

 

This luminary is made with a piece of gourd and wire twisted together to make a Tree of Life. The lumination is made with a Dollar Tree night light that glows blue. By day it shows up as a blue light but by night it looks like a Halloween decoration, right?  The separation fabric between the light fixture itself and the gourd with the tree is a mesh.  Further investigation is needed as you can imagine!

Luminary - A Holey Delight

It's so surprising how the contrast of light and dark can be so transforming!  This gourd is open at the top and the bottom so it can be placed over a tea light without fear of burning. The design is done with Sharpies with various-sized holes made with a variety of drill bits.

Moving into the New Season

Here we are moving into the new season without the legal responsibility of justification. What we enjoyed doing still persists: children's programs, school educational visits, quarterly chapter meetings with a project, and our annual show held at a museum. This year's Member Challenge at our VA Gourd Show in Winchester, VA is in alignment with the Museum of the Shenandoah Valley's traveling exhibit about Alex Ross, the artist behind the Marvel comics superheroes.  MarvelGourd! will be a challenge and an exciting opportunity to see what marvels we can come up with! 

Too Much for a Small Group

 We tried, we really did try to make use of the nonprofit status but for such a small group of volunteers, maintaining a 501c3 was just not worth the effort or what little benefit it garnered. We felt like we were always treading water and barely able to keep swimming. We voted to end it and return to our pure volunteer organization of like-minded gourd gardeners and crafters. Already we can see the energy of the members change and become enthusiastic again once the pressure was off.  

It was worth the try but in the end, the program is better suited for a different situation.

Grants are too big....

Corporate Sponsors help grow connections!.

It is now clear the tourism and arts grants available are intended for larger, MUCH larger nonprofits. One we were excited about turned out to be a matching grant where we would already need money in the bank to get more money. Another grant wanted proof of two business partners in the community that generated a particular amount of tourism dollars.

What about begging letters? MacMillan Dictionary says this is a letter from a poor person to a rich one asking for money. Well, that's a little extreme in our case. We do have some money, it is not like we are desperate. We just have ideas for expanding our outreach. For example, this year we want to move to including artisan arts and skills that align with harvest and gourds: weaving, wood turning and burning, carpentry skills, painting, etc. An interesting 'heritage art' would be storytelling, or what about clogging?

These are the inclusions that cost money, but would help the annual festival become a better, more interesting educational program. THAT is what a grant would be for, or **kaching** sponsorship!  That's the word to use, a sponsorship letter explaining the mission and need for financial support!

The National Council of Nonprofits talks about corporate sponsorships and the need to weigh the benefits of $ a for the nonprofit and the tax exemption benefit to the corporation. In other words, do both get their money's worth? In our case, a company in California would not get as much value of recognized connection (the halo effect) with a Virginia nonprofit as a local company in the area of the festival event. With that in mind, asking for assistance from local banks and companies where the festival will be held will do more good for both.

So, Where Does That Leave Us?

...so, we're talkin' $5,750. Yikes!!  It would take us years to come up with that, yet alone in time for next year's annual festival. BUT, how fabulous if we could get some help to pursue our educational goals of putting on a public festival, provide public outreach presentations, and have enough printed materials to promote our activities to people who may not know about us or our mission.

When is the deadline for the grant? The Virginia Commission for the Arts, General Operating Support grant deadline for this year was March 2, 2015 -- and that was for activities extending from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016. So, it will be perhaps March before we can apply for next year. One coveat though is the website says "Organizations approved for funding will receive no more than 10% of their previous year's cash income."  That could bite us because our income last year was only a little more than $3,000. Ten percent of that is $300...far less than what we'd need to rent the fairgrounds again. Bummer.

While waiting to apply, it best to keep looking for other funding opportunities, right?  Right! It's got to be in the mix somewhere -- we're doing good work, and the money exists!

It's only money, not a needle in a haystack!