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Firefly Charitable Giving 2016
Hi Fireflies, we here at Firefly HQ wanted to give you an update on some of the good things that we are doing to help make the world a better and brighter place.
You all know about our art program and how it helps to make Firefly the magical event that we all know and love. However it goes a bit beyond that as well, the Anniversary grants, this year called the Ivory Grants, also call for the art that we have funded to appear at FIGMENT Boston on the Greenway in downtown Boston. A lot of Firefly funded art has appeared at various venues around Boston and even further afield. Go ART!
Another way in which we are engaging the world outside of our event is in donations to worthwhile groups and organizations. In the past we have made contributions to FIGMENT Boston to support their program of bringing interactive, non-commercial art to the city. This year we will again be helping FIGMENT Boston to bring great, fun art to our fine city.
http://boston.figmentproject.org/
Also new this year is our skills scholarship program. We have realized that there are not as many people in the community with specialized skills such as welding, machining, sewing etc. to support all of the potential art that we might have brewing out there. To that end we have solicited interest in having folks get themselves trained in a skill at one of our fine, local maker-spaces in the hopes that they will then use that new-found skill to help make more art for Firefly and the world.
Also, to help ensure that nascent makerspaces can get off of the ground we have contributed to the Framingham MakerSpace so that they can get themselves some new equipment to teach on.
https://www.facebook.com/Framingham-Makerspace-193223204165086/
And that is not all, we have given three donations to groups servicing different needs in our adopted home of Bethel, VT to help them in their missions to make the world a better place.
White River Valley Ambulance Service delivers emergency response to 10 communities and make more than 1,300 calls a year, some of which have been to Firefly.
The Bethel Area Food Shelf, which has received donations of foodstuffs after the event every year for the past 3-4 years, (Thanks Gearhead Liz!), has been given monies to further their cause in reducing hunger in Bethel and the surrounding towns of East Bethel, Gaysville, Stockbridge, Pittsfield and Barnard in Beautiful Vermont.
Bethel University has as their mission the bringing of a month’s worth of free education on any topic that anyone wishes to teach a class for the entire month of March every year. What a cool way to spread skills and knowledge as widely as possible. Anyone can sign up to teach a course, perhaps there is something that you would like to edify the good folks of Bethel about next March.