RE: Membership benefits
- Subject: RE: [cg] Membership benefits
- From: H* A*
- Date: Tue, 24 Jul 2001 11:37:18 -0400
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Membership Benefits:
I. For
low income gardeners, include P-patch all cotton t-shirt, baseball hat and a
some other trinket. Lotto does well in low income communities: with your
membership you have the chance to win a pair of Felcos, gardening tools, all
expense paid trip to Disneyland or whatever grand prize. I'm serious. You can
get the prizes donated for tax credits - it makes the raffle ( you get so many
tickets for each level of membership) a good fundraising, membership
modality.
II.
Look at the membership levels used by your local PBS/NPR stations & high end
museums for those folks who may or not be gardeners but have middle class and
upper class incomes. Get your pitch books and brochures up to snuff and
approach local corporations to become part of their matching fund charitable
programs ( i.e. if employee A gives to charity number 3 on the list they get our
of HR then the fund is matched by the corporation.) Write a letter to Starbucks
or Microsoft: they might bite. I know that Green Guerrillas, the Trust
for Public Land the Garden Conservancy and other non-for profits groups are
linked on our website as well as big deal gardens like the NY Botanical and
Brooklyn Botanic gardens. Scope out their pitches - you can tailor your own
looking at their examples:
Fundraising:
a)
Living as we do in NYC, where charitable foundations nest in otherwise
bleak corporate office towers, learning how to write grant proposals is as
essential as turning compost. Friends of P-Patch is undoubtedly a 501-c3
corporation and should dragoon, as soon as possible, a Seattle based
University/non-for-profit/non-governmental-organization proposal writer. Offer
them the opportunity to bill for hours and get a letter from you thanking them
for their gift-in-kind: check with a local tax attorney for laws applicable to
your state.
b) If
you don't already have a formal garden and lawn in one of your gardens
suitable for gatherings/cocktail parties for 50-100 people on one of your
P-Patch gardens, create one.
At NYC's Clinton Community Garden,
we designed one for the neighborhood BEFORE we built individual
raised beds for gardeners . It welcomes the community into the garden and
has created supporters among those who only walk by on the way to
work.
It helps big time to show to potential
funders that the places where we had rusted cars, corpses and broken
glass , we now have an organic lawn, flower and native plant beds, bee
hive, benches, grape arbor and a sanctuary for migrating birds. As you pass
around the canapes and chardonnay, being able to show that where we had crack
dealers and whores, we now have nursing mothers and babies taking their first
steps in a public lawn free of glass and dog crap really helps. Having
public events, like weddings, dance and musical concerts really creates the
sense that a community garden is more than a place where people grow veggies and
herbs - it creates a unique local community meeting place as well. I
cannot begin to tell you what having a space like this in the front part of our
150' by 100' lot does for us on a public relations basis. We still have plenty
of room for over 108 raised plots for individual gardeners.
c) The
Clinton Community Garden has a booth at the large neighborhood wide 9th Avenue
International Food Festival where we sell T-shirts, baseball hats, coffee
mugs and water bottles all emblazoned with our garden's logo. Our booth usually
promotes garden legislation, collects petitions and this year also supported
Parks 2001 - a city wide initiative to increase our city's funding for parks,
recreation centers and gardens to 1% of the NYC budget ( it embarrasses me to
say that current funding levels here in the big apple is only at 4/10 of a
percent!) The garden, should it get the permit from the city, will also be
joining with the West 47th - 48th Street block association in a flea market this
fall.
Get
the idea?
Best
wishes,
Adam
Honigman
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