What I did this week
Well the NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship is great news! This allows me to not only go after grants that might not normally give to individuals, but it also allows me to reach out to individual donors who can then claim their donations as tax deductible. This also applies to corporate giving. On top of that I can have donors take advantage of corporate matching programs. Basically the donors are donating money to NYFA and it is earmarked as money to be spent on the specified project. They hold onto the money and make payments out from those funds to any expenses I incur.
In addition to that I have finished the rough draft of the LMCC grant application. I will wrap that up this weekend and finish the draft of the letter to Ben & Jerry’s Foundation. If you want to volunteer to read any of these for me, let me know!
After that I will work on the Jerome Foundation and a couple of others. I also want to plan an event around a planting of a sample plot this spring. If you have a rooftop on which you would like to place a few square feet of green at no cost to you, and are open to letting me access it bi-weekly, and could host a small party, well let’s talk! If you don’t have the space but want to help anyway, I will be looking for sponsors and in-kind donations. And if you just want to come to the party - make sure you are on my mailing list!
I also decided that I would like to launch the project in a few neighborhoods simultaneously - Lower Manhattan, Bronx and Brooklyn. If you are interested in being one of the initial recipients of a green roof module and either own your own building, have a good relationship with your landlord or are interested in working with me to get approval from your landlord (or are a landlord/developer with a public roof space), please email me and we can set something up.
I’m excited - can feel the momentum building - how about you??