Help Save The Icelandic Goat

Iceland is a beautiful country filled with beautiful life and sadly one of those lifeforms is threatened: the Icelandic goat. The goats have been on HBO’s Game of Thrones and now they all may die out if a goat farming operation can’t be saved.

You can be a part of the goat-saving operation through a new Indiegogo campaign!

There are less than 820 Icelandic goats left on Earth. Needlessly reducing their population by almost half risks the extinction of an entire species already in a desperately fragile state.
You can help rescue the goats from Game of Thrones by donating to the campaign to save farmer Johanna Thorvaldsdóttir’s goat farm.
Time is of the essence. If the funds are not raised within the next month to save Johanna’s farm, this unique species, introduced to Iceland by the Vikings a thousand years ago, will disappear from the earth forever.

Indiegogo

Via Packwood

A Game Designed to Help Solve Eye Problems

Diplopia – A VR Game to Help Strabismus and Amblyopia is exactly what it sounds like. This sounds like a great gaming project! The game is meant to help people who have some eye issues strengthen their weak eye to restore (near) perfect control over their stereo-vision.

You can contribute to the project at IndieGogo (only 6 days left!).

From the developer:

Strabismus, better known as crossed eye, is present in about 4% of children. In those affected both eyes do not line up properly causing diplopia (double vision), amblyopia (lazy eye), and loss of vision in one or both eyes. Since the brain receives conflicting information from the two eyes it often learns to disregard the weaker of the two, suppressing it. This leads to a loss of depth perception and 3D vision.

Contribute now at Indiegogo.
Find out more at the official website.

Camino Wear: Clothing for Walking

Camino Wear is a clothing line that is focused on celebrating walking, travel, and adventure. The inspiration for the clothing line comes the founder’s walk along the Camino de Santiago.

We believe that walking, travel and adventure are some of the most important things in life.

Walking, because (in our humble opinion) slow travel is best. To be outdoors, to be active, to be in one’s environment = a happier, healthier life full of beautiful, small moments.

Travel, because this world is incredible and so very diverse. Meeting new people and experiencing new things allows us to grow; both in our compassion for others and also for ourselves.

Adventure, because life is too short to become complacent.

Because purposeful wandering is the opposite of being lost.

They are looking for love and support on Indiegogo, there are only 8 days left:

Crowdfunding for Political Change

Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have changed the way some projects get funding by using contributions from individuals on a large scale. There have been many art projects and products that have come into existence thanks to this new trend in crowdfunding.

Todd Aalgaard has wondered if crowdfunding can be used to encourage progressive politics. His insights into what crowdfunding can mean to political movements is a good read.

Expanding on the social remedy to this crisis that crowdfunding provides, the white paper goes on. “Besides the obvious benefit of increased fundraising potential,” it reads, “crowdfunding also offers a creative and engaging approach to raising awareness of your mission and, ultimately, growing your brand.”

“Think about it like this. It’s what we like to call the Rule of 10,” it reads. “First, imagine your organization has a donor list of 100 people. Now imagine your organization builds a crowdfunding campaign, and 10 of your supporters participate. Those 10 people create personal fundraising pages and then broadcast these pages to their social networks on a site like Facebook.”

The knock-on result, it suggests, is that the ripple-effect outreach brings a message, political, humanitarian, or otherwise, to roughly 10 times your initial donor base. In an emerging reality where democracy is influenced by a select and very powerful few, fundraising working in tandem with outreach—a basic strategy in both of Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaigns—is a way to resist the forces working against the public at every turn.

Read more at the Bankless Times.

New Art Project Examines Humanity and Art-as-Experience

ZED.TO is an art project that is examining how people relate to one another while exploring the boundaries of art and theatre. It’s run by a small group called the Mission Business and looks like they’re going to create something downright nifty.

ZED.TO – an immersive biotech adventure from Trevor Haldenby on Vimeo.

This project is an exploration of format. We are curious about what happens when artists and strategic thinkers move outside of their own specific realms to collaborate in story making and story telling. Toronto is currently in a financial artistic crisis. Looking at the report on municipal per capita investment in the arts that just came out this week, Toronto is at the bottom of list of Canadian cities dollar investment in the arts. It’s not a secret that cities flourish when a government invests in culture. The return on investment is high when you invest in the arts. As a result of this lack of funding, the art we are creating is void of risk. The Mission Business, a new collective on the Toronto arts scene, is inevitably caught in a cycle that won’t allow us to gain from writing grants because our project doesn’t fit into any category box, and no one knows our work to be proven successfully. So we are expected to go round and round in a cycle that wants us to prove ourselves before we are supported by larger funding bodies, but we get caught because we can’t put anything up without that support. The problem here is the same as the art-making. No one wants to take a risk. For me, creating an experience that is inherently risky in format and content as well as collaboration, makes sense in a period where we are being forced to do what is considered safe. How are we expected to create change if we do the same thing over and over expecting different results? Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

To get their project running they are looking for financing through IndieGoGo, find out more at ZED.TO on IndieGogo

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