The GalaCon 2012 Charity Auction

Photo courtesy 404compliant

The first German Friendship is Magic convention, GalaCon, held a charity auction on the second day, the proceeds of which, 100% of them, went to our Seeds of Kindness fundraiser. To the shock and utter amazement of probably all involved, the auction generated more funds than the charity auction at BronyCon, despite its one order of magnitude more attendees. Here an excerpt from my report for Derpy Hooves News.

The Sunday was first and foremost the day of our charity auction. As a member of Bronies for Good and board member of Your Siblings, I already expected the auction to become the single most momentous event for me at the Gala. Little did I know. After a hastened meal I hastened downstairs and was promptly greeted by Perry who asked me if I could join her on stage to introduce Bronies for Good, Your Siblings, the Seeds of Kindness fundraiser, and the project that was to receive the donations. Though I was reasonably confident in my knowledge of the topic and of the English language, stages, microphones, and speaking were among the things I habitually shunned.

My intro went well enough and it was time for Perry with her silver tongue to take over.

As activist in the area of charity work you are too often confronted with people who either don’t help at all, or for who their support is only a means to better their public image or that of a group they represent. I can’t find fault with enjoying those perks at times, but centrally your motivation should always be born of your love for those you help. Of that love I have felt plenty that afternoon—so overwhelmingly even that I almost cried several times:

A Flim cosplayer donating his hat, praising its value, and then buying it right back; friends pooling their money and driving the auction into vertiginous heights; someone winning a Canni figurine and donating it back; Perry bowing to public demand and spontaneously donating her beloved hat (signed of course) to vie with Weatherhoof’s; and one person repeatedly winning items for friends who couldn’t keep up with the bidding and directly gifting them to them. In total, the auction generated €8145 (about $10,060) for the expansion of the orphanage in Uganda. On behalf of the project, I extend my warmest thanks to these people, to everyone who participated in the auction, to all those who donated in kind, and of course to the organizers!

Update: One of the bidders at the auction has yet to pay a final installment of €600 as of 2014-07-11. Not counting this outstanding payment, the auction netted €7545. Legends of Equestria graciously donated another €274 at the con.

Smile! breaks $21,000 & Introducing “Seeds of Kindness”

Amazing news everybody!

We just broke the $18,000 bar on the donation page! In fact, we all even raised more than $21,000 for the Children’s Cancer Association, because all of the tips to GlobalGiving got back to the CCA as an extra bonus, so that they actually receive $3,000 more than what is shown!

There is only one week left until the 25th, when the winners of the prizes are decided, so be quick if you want to be one of them! As of now, the two top donors are tied for first prize, and the four top donors after them for the second, so I want to make sure everything is clear on what will happen if they don’t make other donations by the 25th. As explained in the initial post, donations are cumulative and in the event of a tie, the donor whose last donation was made the earliest will get priority.

Thank you so much to all of you for your generosity, and a big shout-out to all of the artists who contributed to this! We will still be taking taking donations for a while, but be sure to follow the instructions to get the album.

Introducing Seeds of Kindness

Because good things do NOT end, we are currently working toward an even bigger event, and we are looking for artists willing to lend their talent and help a worthy cause!
This next event, “Seeds of Kindness”, will fund two projects:

– The first $10,000 collected will be used to complete the building and supplying of a clinic in Uganda, where there is less than one doctor per 12,000 people, and life expectancy is only about fifty years. After this initial impulse, the clinic will be self-sustainable and able to provide free emergency care without any external help for anyone who can’t afford to pay for it.

– When the clinic is fully funded, the next donations will be used to build a Green Village in Burundi, where street children who lost their parents to the civil war can find a home and learn to earn their subsistence without having to resort to crime.

The policy of our partner, Your Siblings, is to cover all travel and personal costs as well as money transfer fees independently from donations, so that 100% of what you give will be spent exclusively on said projects.

How you can help:

– My Little Remix is currently working on another charity album, which will be instantly sent to every donor. If you’re good with music and want to contribute to this cause, you can find more info here.

– Just as with Smile!, we would like to offer extra prizes to the most generous donors! We can’t say exactly how much before the event ends, but we received HUGE donations, and their sum is several times higher than the sum of what each individual prize would have sold for on eBay. If you either make or own custom pony art (or even non-pony stuff such as Steam gifts) and want to use your talent to make the world a better place to live, we would love to collaborate with you, so shoot us an email: broniesforgood at gmail dot com!

– If you are more versed in the digital arts and can’t make any physical gift, you can also contribute with a gift to charity and the whole community: We are also looking for various kinds of media that can be released to celebrate major milestones! If you are up for the challenge, email us with your ideas and we will contact you with further information and advice.

Once again, thank you all so much for making all of this possible!
Love and solidarity to you all.

A reminder and a few more things

So the development of this site has almost come to a close and we will be adding a few things here and there as ideas take us.

During September we organized the blood drive: Nurse Redheart’s Roundup, we had quiete a few participants which made us extremely happy and which unquestionably helped many people who depend on the donations. However, this event is still very open and anyone who can, can participate. We would also appreciate it if you would let us know about your participation by adding your name on a spreadsheet. This event also counts towards earning your own BfG button! All the nessecary information can be found under Projects -> Present on this website.

We have also started to elect “charities of the month” you can find these on the very top of the page. Donating more than $20 dollars to any charity will also help you on your way to earning a button from us (the details are on the Projects -> Present page)

And last update is: we now have our own Steam group! You can find it here: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/bronies_for_good

That’s all from me for now, until next time.

Future Plans

Hello comrades, so during the meeting earlier, we discussed and toyed around with the idea of reaching out to the creators or commercial parties of the MLP:FIM franchise about possibly working together in trying to mobilize the wider energies of the MLP fanbase into attending and organizing community and charity service events.

This is what we have so far:

Possible creators/owners to contact: Daniel Ingram, Sabrina Alberghetti, Lauren Faust, Hasbro, etc. (Informing them of our organization, goals, and if they would be willing to assist us in someway with it)

Possible intermediary contacts: Sethisto, Phoe, etc. (we would ask them about means of contact, considerations, advice)

What do you guys think about attempting this? What way we would we go about doing this? Who would we contact?

Feel free to share your thoughts, feelings, or criticisms by responding to this post.

Once we reach a consensus, we can go ahead and follow through contacting them

Alright Bronies, that’s all for now! Love, friendship, and make sure to donate this month!

A couple things…

A good friend of mine and I did some work on the forum. We installed a better looking theme and he created a couple temporary banners. I can’t decide which one is better, so I’ll leave it up to you! (side note: These images are scaled down 60%)

This one?

or this one?

I’m using the first one for right now, but if you’d rather have the other just let me know. Again, this is temporary, I was just getting tired of the forum looking so bland.

In other news, I’m considering adding a widget for THIS LINK which will allow anyone to donate to a charity that changes monthly. Feel free to check it out.

JustGive.org

During the meeting we had yesterday, I found a site called JustGive.org. According to the site, there is a “database of nearly 1.8 million charities.” You can search by charity name, keyword, city, state, zip code and Tax ID / EIN. Once you have found one that you are interested in you can click to find out more information such as mission, programs, what they do and even financial data.

I thought this would be great for people who are looking for local charities. I searched my zip and found 188 different results, which surprised me.

I encourage everyone to check this out, you may just find something you would really like to donate some money to.

Here is a link that takes you directly to the “Give Now” section of the website.

Oh! Hello there.

Woah. When I heard from Martinwil that an e-mail was sent to Sethisto about BfG, I didn’t expect to see much more traffic than usual. Boy, was I wrong. I am excited to see so many people who are eager to join up with us! Thank you to Equestria Daily (and Phoe) for posting the article.

It looks like the we are trying to organize a food drive for the next BroNYcon, I’m sure the details will be fleshed out very soon. We also have a timesheet for community service hours and type (also thanks to Martinwil) which can be found HERE.

There has been some interest from the people over at The Fourth Floor. They are selling some sweet pony themed Monopoly tokens and are willing to donate $1 from each sale to BfG.

One last bit: There is a discussion on the BfG Facebook page on what our logo should be. I have my heart set on one, but I want to leave it up to everyone else so we can all be happy about the decision. I’ve also created a similar thread on the forum, but with the look of the entire site in mind.

Again, thank you to everyone! Together we can make this world a better place!