Funding through Charitable Trusts

Fundraising & Partners
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Many years ago I was chairman of a charity that had a simple goal. Build a poly tunnel in London on an allotment or other available site for the interested parties. The intention was to for interested stake-holders to grow what they wished for in a safe, enclosed polytunnel/greenhouse. It was set up, funded and built in two years with the help of various existing charities.
Here is what I remember of the funding process.

  • We had a simple to understand, goal, an initial meeting in person from a local ‘Going For Green’ charity set up by Merton Council.
  • About 20-25 people turned up, A temp chair-person and secretary and date for the next meeting was set up.
  • I was elected chair at the next meeting as a plan of action discussion was formulated.
  • We created a charitable trust.
  • We met about once a month
  • We set up a treasurer, Website (I did that) and started visiting potential sites etc.
  • Once a safe infrastructure was in place, we applied for funding
  • I learned a lot. Funding is easy BUT time consuming. We had an initial grant from the ‘Going for Green’ charity of I think £500
  • As we neared the end of the process the initial tunnel cost £10 000, the scheme was being considered for other similar tunnels across London.
  • The tunnel was built. I never saw it. Went there once but the allotment was under padlock.

How does this apply to what you are doing? Well …
You will find some peculiar funding partners. For example I met a former executive from Shell Oil (he worked on bribing despots in Africa). We got £2000 from them. Yep was a deal with the devil.

Anyway here is the sort of banking we set up …

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Thanks for the info on the Multibank model. I’d never heard of it before. At the moment we aren’t looking af fundraising from that perspective, though we are looking an multiple approaches.

Presently we are looking at techinal pro-open-source funds/grants, and partnerships with developers working with Spritely-related projects (and helping them land smaller grants.)

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Many thanks,

Remember, I barely understand where I am or what I am doing here …
BUT
I will look at Goblin-chat and probably the first language model you recommend, as support for Lua is underway. One of our Puppy Linux sponsors created Murga Lau and funded the Puppy Linux forum for many years. Sadly John Murga died leaving kids. Lua is a language I looked at and liked. I certainly do not have the smarts to program in it.
The other language has too liberal a license. Got caught out with the CURL language when it went to Japan
BUT we did create and Use CurlChat for a while

It was the progamming language that was clear enough to read and comprehend what was being done by more experienced programmers. Sadly its ‘open source’ nature never arrived. Not even sure who owns it now …
As you know this happens again and again.

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Understood.
I can understand why you want to remain ‘dark’. As soon as money is sniffed, the coke fuelled sharks arrive.

Meanwhile, in bad news (for me), I managed to completely bork my Manjaro system. I am fed up with passwords. Puppy Linux never used them on physical devices we had control over (they were kind of optional). Pretty sure I should not have used the option to block read and write on initial passwords. Ah well, there is no defence against idiotic behaviour. I will revive Manjaro at some point … Just trying to resist the idea of putting Dragora GNU/Linux-Libre on it … or something equally beyond my ability …