Result is O-fficial.

The Foundation has worked to find an accessible, but satisfying, goal for its fund-raising.  Our theory is that our neighbors would sooner and more enthusiastically contribute to their Foundation, which is really only themselves, if they had in mind a clear picture of how the money would be spent.  "What are you planning to do with the money?" is a very frequent question when we solicit donations.  So we have a loose list of ideas and theories as to how money would be spent, and we recite them to people.  They're usually vague and hypothetical, and often enough, they can be grand schemes.  So we applied ourselves to getting real about a goal.

Some of our goals are too small to be captivating.  They can require as little as a few hundred dollars.  Sometimes, we thought of projects that really cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.  None of these satisfied those we solicited, and none of them really satisfied us.  And sometimes, we tried to attach ourselves to accessible projects, just because they were accessible, not because they were such good ideas.

We relied primarily on others to suggest projects.  We had no special way to come up with ideas ourselves, unless it was some idiosyncratic idea, like my public art obsession.  But we would hear, either individually or in the context of a Foundation meeting, about others' ideas or others' wishes.  And our job was to react to an idea, and experience interpersonal resonance to it.

The winning idea was the following:  The park has a tot lot (it sort of has two of them), and the surface of that lot is mulch.  Mixed into the mulch is (reportedly) excrement from pets or wild animals, and there is a sprinkling of cigarette butts.  There seemed to be pretty good agreement that this surface needed to be replaced.  Not with new mulch, which would suffer the same fate as the old mulch, but with something else.

We decided resurfacing the tot lot was just the project for us.  It's not a small cost, and it's a stretch at about $30,000, but we felt it would be a wonderful improvement for the neighborhood, and it's something that wasn't exactly a pie in the sky financially.  Not easy, but not impossible.

So thanks for your participation ($20 per household per year) if you've been a contributing neighbor, and welcome aboard if you haven't yet.  For a project of this financial magnitude, we'll have to extend ourselves, and we will look for outside sponsors as well.  But remember, the Foundation is you.  It's ourselves.  And its fruits are for our enrichment.  So give us your best consideration.  It's consideration you're really giving yourself.