CreativeMornings/Vancouver

CreativeMornings/Vancouver Needs Your Help

UPDATE

We’re proud to announce that we have raised $1,500 of the $5,000 required to outfit our video team with the new equipment they need to continue to produce the excellent video archives of CreativeMornings/Vancouver events. Deep thanks to the many who donated. Your generosity will not be forgotten and we’re hoping to do something special for you all soon.

If you believe in the power of creativity and community and would like to help us continue to present successful professionals from a variety of fields talking about what creativity means to them and how they’ve applied it in their lives and careers, please consider clicking the donate button below. Thanks for your support.

Dear friends of CreativeMornings/Vancouver,

Happy birthday CMVan!
Last month CMVan celebrated its one year anniversary—and what a year it has been! A browse through our Tumblr blog tells the story of a brand new kind of event in Vancouver aimed at building community centred around creativity right in the downtown east side. We’re pleased that we’ve caught the attention of so much media and received many letters of thanks for our support partners. But most of all we’re honoured that twelve amazing speakers generously donated their time to share with us their thoughts on creativity and the role it’s played in their careers, lives and communities.

As you know, we are a greed-free initiative, and besides our volunteers, we rely entirely on our generous support partners to offset venue and catering costs each month (thank you sponsors!). Without these organization who believe in the power of creativity and community building, CMVan could not exist. But we have a need that goes beyond our monthly expenses.

We’re facing a challenge.
One of the mandates of CMVan is to create a high quality video archive that demonstrates the creativity and talent of Vancouver to the world. If you haven’t watched the videos of past CMVan speakers’ inspiring talks, please check out our Vimeo page. These videos are viewed thousands of times all over the planet and contribute to the growing perception of Vancouver’s creative prowess. But as mentioned above, the events and videos are produced entirely by unpaid volunteers.

We have a terrific team of volunteer videographers and photographers who kindly bring their own cameras, lights, mics, laptops, harddrives, etc. to capture these events each month. Unfortunately the digital video camera and old laptop they use to capture the footage and edit our videos have failed and need to be replaced immediately. But of course we have no income and thus no money!

We considered launching a public fundsourcing campaign, but felt it was too soon after the recent Kickstarter campaign which raised funds for a global online initiative (thank you if you supported that). Unfortunately none of those funds are available to our chapter, so we are asking for your help directly. Specifically, we need at least one (preferably two actually) HD video cameras and a laptop (Mac or PC) with a fast enough processor, RAM and big enough hard drive to function as a portable video editing system. We estimate the cameras will cost between $2,500-3,000, and the laptop $2,000-$2,500. In future we’d also like to purchase our own wireless lav mics and additional lights, but we can make due borrowing those for a while longer.

How you can help.
We’ve worked hard to make these events (and yummy breakfasts!) accessible and FREE to everyone, but now we’re asking for a little bit of support from each of you. We would be grateful if you or your organization were willing to support CMVan with a donation of funds or hardware. Consider this; if 1,000 of you donated just the price of a coffee and a muffin, we’d immediately be able to outfit our volunteer video team with the equipment they require to continue the work they are doing for us all. Alternatively, we’d be pleased to offer monthly recognition as a sustaining support partner to any organization willing to purchase or donate a camera or laptop for us to use.

What’s ahead.
We’re excited about the year ahead and CMVan volunteers are already hard at work planning a terrific speaker line up. Starting in January 2013 there will be global themes each month, unifying our chapter with the 35 others around the world as we consider creativity as it relates to broad topics like happiness, money, re-use, the future, backwards, & food. Fun, right? We hope you’ll join us often.

Thank you to everyone who has helped us make these events,
Mark Busse
Organizer & Host, CreativeMornings/Vancouver

WEB http://www.creativemornings.com/
TUMBLER http://creativemorningsvancouver.tumblr.com/
FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/CreativeMorningsVancouver
TWITTER https://twitter.com/#!/vancouver_cm
FLICKR http://www.flickr.com/photos/creativemorningsvancouver


If you appreciate the work the CreativeMornings/Vancouver volunteers are doing, please click the “Donate” button below to help ensure the continued success of these important creative community events.