Fundraising: Story 7.

Funny thing about money – it is like a bloodstream of one’s body, essential to bringing oxygen and sugars to brain, washing up the liver and sweetly swelling our reproductive organs.
But why do we resent it so much then?
Why money for us has such an exaggerated meaning, either too good or too bad?
Is it because we see how a man who needs only 10 pints of blood to live on, accumulates 20, 40 or 500 000 pints!?
Or is it because we worry that we might need an extra pint tomorrow?

It happens quite often when I get paid for a job, lets say $4000
and I know that it’ll last me exactly 2 months and that my next income is hidden in the Clouds of Future (most likely, wont come for next 5 months)
that I get very cautious with the money at the start. I sit on it like a stingy dog and bark at anyone who comes too close to my pile:
– I am not subscribing to your magazine!
– I am not buying your crappy shoes!
– I am not eating at your overpriced food stand!
– I can fill up my own plastic bottles with my own tap water!
But the moment I am down to the bare bones ($500) and I still dont know when is my next income to come I get generous.
– Let me leave a nice tip so that they like us the next time.
– Take my gloves, if you like them. I can get a new pair.
– This banana looks rotten, but let me support small business anyway.
It feels like a small suicide to give the money away when you don’t have it. Generosity opens the gap in the flesh wider so that you can bleed more successfully.
Miraculously, when you are down to $10, New Job shreds Clouds of Future and arrives on your desk with shining $1000 check in it’s teeth.
That’s what’s so funny about money – it will never let you die.
It’ll flow back to you.

But let me get back to Fundraising.
When one says “Fundraising” one imagines a beautiful woman with long golden hair in a long embroidered skirt plowing a field, fertilizing it with dry bits of manure, sowing corn or poppy seeds. Then she sits quietly at the edge of the field watching the funds raise from the loosened soil.
The reality is quite different.
In February I applied for NYSCA grant with “Rocks in My Pockets”. But, as you know, you can’t apply to NYSCA directly, as an individual. By kindness of Women Make Movies, a non-profit organization that supports women filmmakers and their projects, I applied for NYSCA grant through them.
In August I received an email from Women Make Movies that my project got the NYSCA grant, which is about 10 per cent of what I need to make “Rocks In My Pockets”. It was a good start no matter what.
But the best thing was that by getting this grant Women Make Movies became my project’s Fiscal Sponsor. Which means that, if an organization or an individual donated money to my project, it was a tax deductible donation.
Sound great, right?
But where does one get an organization or an individual willing to donate small or large sums of money to an animated film project about depression?
Again, Women Make Movies generously sent me a list of foundations and organizations that support arts and film projects. I sent dozens of emails with inquiries. Some of the foundations got back to me saying the project wasn’t for them. Some of them didn’t bother to get back. For some of them I missed the deadline by just a day or two.
I went to Google for an advise.
“Foundations”
Voila – a website called foundationcenter.org !
It’s all very interesting and informative but the moment you want to get a specific information it asks you to subscribe for $19.95 a month!
What will I get for $19.95?
– We are not telling. You buy and then you’ll see.
Hmm…
Maybe a good old book can give me something better? I go to Borders.
“An Ultimate Guide to Foundations”. A great title. $50.
What will I get for $50?
There is a list of foundations. A good thing about Borders is that you don’t have to buy a book. It takes about an hour and half to write down the names of foundations that look interesting on that list.
I go home and Google the foundations. Most of them are out of business since 1994 or 1996.
That’s what you get from a book for $50 in Borders. Old info.
I go back to Google.
“List of foundations”.
Voila – lists of foundations.
Turns out, foundations support all kinds of things, not only arts. How to know which one is for arts and which is for medical research?
Google, again.
Before I know, I spent the whole week raking through Google and my real work (drawing) on “Rocks In My Pockets” is on hold.
The seeds I threw on the freshly plowed earth turned out to be just bits of ground-up pasta, nothing will raise on my field.
The time that I lost will never be regained.
I’d have been better off by just making darn drawings.
Or buying the rotten bananas in the neighborhood store. The $1 spent on those would come back to me threefold in a few months.