One of the excellent things about taking the Internship in Technology and Social Justice has been Marianne’s leadership and the bi-weekly class she leads for those taking the internship. Each meeting, we go over our various internship positions, share the best-and-worst of the job since we met last, and then talk a bit about a new avenue of the education and non-profit worlds, with this week’s focus falling on grants and proposals. We were assigned to write a mock letter of inquiry, which if this were for a real-world non-profit would ideally secure grants and funding for whatever they/I/we were planning. In my case however, having no dire need for cash (at least not for anyone’s benefit but my own and my loan providers’), I was forced to make up a cause. So I want to put babies on spikes.
Disclaimer: I do not advocate putting any kind of baby on any kind of spike. This is based on a routine that comedian Eddie Izzard does about the opportunities and dreams in America, where one can put babies on spikes, and you kinda have to be familiar with that in order to know that it’s a funny joke — and that I am not a sick and evil sadist but rather a witty writer with a sophisticated love of excellent comedy. Or so I tell myself so I can sleep at night.
Anyhoo, here goes:
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March 19, 2007
Mr. Big Guy, Program Officer
The Whoever Foundation
4 Privet Drive
New York, NY 10011
Dear Mr. Guy:
I’m writing to you on behalf of the Babies on Spikes Organization, who is seeking funding from your organization to seed development for our biggest community outreach yet. This new project we’re taking on seeks to put fake babies in the hands of any member of the Jersey City community in need, especially those with excess spikes. BoSO is seeking $50,000, payable over the next sixteen months, from the Whoever Foundation. The first payment of $25,000 will be used to procure and distribute the most appropriate fake babies, while the second will be used to provide follow-up check ins for fake baby recipients and will aid in spike surplus relocation.
Since its incorporation in early 2006, the Babies on Spikes Organization has grown from a small team of baby-spikers in central New Jersey to a full-on grassroots web, now counting active members in the hundreds. BoSO has been and will always be committed to providing the tools, knowledge and expertise to practically put babies on spikes wherever there are people interested in doing so. While initially focused only on plastic fake babies, BoSO has now branched out into foam and plaster babies as well.
With its headquarters in scenic downtown Jersey City, the Babies on Spikes Organization has grown from a humble five-person office to a two hundred person compound with satellite offices in New York, California and London. However, the organization has managed to hold true to its original goal of providing educational literature to any parties interested in furthering the mission of spiking fake babies, holding a lecture series on baby-spiking, and offering classes in spike technique, proper fake baby selection and a “What does your spike say about you?” seminar.
Those who come to the Babies on Spikes Organization searching help are treated like family, and in turn, we here at BoSO see a 70% rate of visitors who become members, and find ourselves blessed with a large pool of applicants for volunteer positions and leadership roles in our organization. Our in-house training methods are been the subject of numerous nonprofit industry profiles, and while we like to spend as much time as possible focused on our subjects and their fake babies, the press will hopefully alert other members of the community to the issue and bring many more closeted baby-spikers out of the woodwork.
As the BoSO’s founder and president, I, Michael J. Dory, continue to be active in as much of the day-to-day spiking and spike-planning as possible while continuing to oversee the broader mission of our group. Assistant spikers early on, Tom Keane and Sean Patrick Scully now serve the BoSO as CFO and CEO, respectively, and the three of us generally plan for and execute the designs for the company at large. Our team also includes spike designer Rita Chipalkatty and BoSA ombudsman Nicole Signoretta, who have served as anchors during the BoSA’s great growth and have continued to provide expert guidance to both board members and team leaders alike.
Specifically, the monies acquired in this grant would serve to accomplish many goals, starting with the purchase of several pallets of fake babies for distribution throughout the community. We are planning to allot $10,000 for this purchase, as we will need quite a few fake babies if we’re going to have the impact desired, and we will use the remaining $15,000 from the first installment to hire and train part-time workers for this period. The second installation of funding will go to similar sources, depending on the accuracy of our predictions for the first wave.
Certainly, we could not expect Whoever to be our sole source of income, and with that in mind have spent a fair amount of time this past winter securing grants from outside sources, including but not limited to the MacArthur Foundation, McDonalds Corporation and Target. So far, we’ve worked our way up to nearly 70% of our target funding for the next two years, and your help would push us up to the top, giving us the income necessary to really make a strong impact on the community and deliver on the promise we made last year when we began our first baby-spiking missions here in the streets of Jersey City.
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And I stopped there, partly because I was laughing so hard that I was afraid I’d wake my neighbors (for like the fourth time in so many days) and for the mostly-realistic concern that I hadn’t adequately priced out the costs associated with putting fake babies on spikes, the market prices of foam vs. plastic, the market penetration of spike owners in the greater NYC metro area, etc., and therefore felt I couldn’t adequately make an itemized budget for the request. I mean, I could have just made numbers up, but that’d be just silly.
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