TN Fall Contest: The Awesome Frontier
Submitted by Sarah D. Bunting on October 4, 2007 – 8:13 PM23 Comments
1. I’m told that La Danes has already spent her money on The Final Awesome — including the My So-Called Digital Life project. Generous and prompt? Awesome!
2. I’ve done some spending of my own — $500 each on “Where’s My Chair?”, Franklin Spanish/English talking dictionaries, Frog Dissection with My 7th Grade Class, Inner City Bronx Math Geeks Need HELP!, and My So-Called Digital Life.
And at the suggestion of a couple of smart readers, I also donated $500 to the operations of Donors Choose.
That leaves me with 2K left to spend. I’ll get around to it.
3. New prizes are coming onto the main contest page all the time, so check it out.
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Tags: contests
This is all just beyond-words amazing.
How Claire Danes manages to find time to care about this stuff, in the midst of 8-performances-a-week as Liza Doolittle in Pygmalion, is mindboggling. I feel like I ought to travel up to NYC and buy a ticket to a performance, just to show my support for her awesomeness.
Sars,
I don’t know if anyone has said this but I want to thank you for creating such a cool mission. I’ve read that you’re amazed at how great the donors are but the way I look at it is that you have awesome people around you because you’re awesome. I know that you’ve put a lot of time into this and I (and I’m sure many others) appreciate it.
Si! Thank you indeed!
I presume next year you’ll just set the bar at $100,000 and let us go to town?
Ditto what Kari said- I’d like to believe that, knowing Donors Choose is an organization working right in my backyard, and also knowing that my very best friend does a lot of work with them, that I would’ve donated the money I donated this week, contest or not.
…but I know myself, and I know that I let life get in the way, I tell myself I’ll do it tomorrow, I tell myself I don’t have time to think about it, I can’t spare the money- all BS.
It’s probably pathetic that it takes something like this to get me motivated, but it’s true. The feeling of being part of something is huge motivtion to get it done.
So thanks Sars, because that extra push made all the difference, probably for a lot of us. (even if we don’t want to admit it.)
We’ve raised some $60,000 in four days, not counting the matching funds from Sars and Claires (nice rhyme theres)… I know the pace has slowed, but who’s to say we won’t make $100,000 THIS year?
Poking around the projects you mentioned up above, I read the following, and promptly burst into tears.
So the next time I hear, “Where’s My Chair?” I hope I can say, “It’s here thanks to DonorsChoose.”
I am so proud to be a part of this Sars, and you must be ever so proud of yourself for setting this up.
Yay TN! Yay for awesome!
So let me get this straight, of the $12K+ spent on the Final Awesome, 5K came directly from Ms Danes? Coolies.
At the same time I feel like we’re cheating on the 25K target when she’s taking out 20% for us.
The kids still get their stuff though so ‘eh
She’s taking out 20% because YOU ALREADY RAISED FIFTY GRAND!
Or, think of it this way: it’s a fund-raiser; we raised her funds.
CJRW, that’s exactly what I was thinking yesterday. “God, what is she going to set the bar at next year?!” LOL
I just wanted to say that I agree with K. You’ve managed to make donating fun, and that is a huge motivator, plus we all get to participate in the awesomeness that we wouldn’t feel if were just making donations all by our lonesome. Add me to the list of “haven’t donated yet, since I’m waiting for payday.”
So I just went into the Final Awesome to check it, and we’re at 54%. And it’s still not 10am on the East Coast, so most of the “get paid on Fridays” haven’t even been paid yet! And it’s the FIFTH.
I’m with Alan Swann. So much, in fact, that I think it bears repeating.
SIXTY THOUSAND dollars in FOUR DAYS.
It’s inspirational, that’s what it is. Sars should be on the Today show even WITHOUT the whole 5’10” tomato thing.
Sars, you’re going to be so cute in that tomato costume, dancing around!
~O~
^
And what Kari said. You are so awesome, you create a vortex of awesomeness & it draws awesomality to you, like gravity.
(Next year, a hen costume & the chicken dance??? If not, I can see it in my head pretty well anyway!)
If you’re not careful, you’ll be swamped with worthy causes who want to be next.
Maybe that’s not a bad thing…
Hee! Updated prize list! Any contest that is giving away a sock monkey as a prize rocks extra extra hard!
@KPP: OMG, a *sock monkey*. How cool is that. I had one of those when I was a kid.
I love this contest. I’m so glad that I was fished in by the hope of a Staples gift certificate, of all things. I don’t even *go* to Staples, but hey, gift certificate . . . and now for the past few days, TN has been the first thing I check when I wake up in the morning. Definitely a good start to my day.
58%, hooray!
Sars–
As someone who runs a nonprofit, I wanted to thank you for donating to DonorsChoose as well as to their projects, and thanks, readers who suggested it. The projects for the kids are the fun, tear-jerking part, but I’m sure the good people at DonorsChoose have lots of much less interesting expenses, like insurance and phones and a copier and printer cartridges and, of course, paying people. So thanks, on behalf of non-profits everywhere!
Do you know someone outstanding? You can stop by the Today Show’s website and tell them all about her.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17609548/
At the very least, maybe Donor’s Choose will get an on-air mention, and that’s good news for everybody.
So um….is it too late to see if the Tomato could ride a girls’ bike?
Sars —
So I left my Development Econ class today thinking about philanthropic issues (you would too, if you’d seen your prof close to tears discussing river blindness and AIDS orphans) and wondering if there was some way we could take the energy generated here and, well, keeping running with it somehow.
I don’t know of any organization that has Donors Choose’s specific setup — do you? Kiva is the closest I’ve seen, in that donors/lenders can choose the individual recipients in that there’s that “$185 loaned / $215 to go” handy progress bar. I assume you’ve been talking to the Donors Choose people a lot lately — have they been able to look into their model spreading to other nonprofits, or do they have their hands full expanding their operations (and putting up with our emails) as it is?
It would be (ahem) awesome if, say, UNICEF or Doctors Without Borders could sponsor a “Plumpython 2008” with progress bars for individual field offices/ projects/locations. (Info on Plumpy’nut.) Which is to say, yes, you make it fun, with your head-shaving and tomato dances and stories of extremely fat cats, but the DC setup also plays a part, and I feel like those of us who otherwise don’t have a lot to offer the nonprofit sector should be spreading the word about that.
…or something. Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to wait ’til the next Tomato Nation to feel the particular philanthropic exciting warm fuzzies.
Margaret in CO, you are genius. Well, it might be a little same-y to do costumes two years in a row, but WHAT OF MY HEN? Heh.
1. I love this!
2. Is it sad that I want to win the banana bread. I want banana bread called Fat Elvis.
3. Only 6 Michigan projects makes me sad… I emailed everyone I know in education. You should see more.