Thank you, thank you, thank you -
Community of friends, colleagues, fellow parents and lovers of sustainable futures.
Together we reached our goal. We will be in touch with you personally about your reward and very soon we will be sending you web videos to share with your networks.
We can't wait!

Deep gratitude for your support.
Sophie and Helen

You may wonder, as I often do when I “kick in” to projects I like, where is my money going?

For the (8) webisodes this $9,000 will help us pay professionally for:

(1) film editor for 8 weeks
(1) online community manager + web designer for 4 weeks
(1) sound and music designer flat fee
(1) production manager (editorial, web + outreach) for 8 weeks
(1) web programmer and technical assistance flat fee
(1) simple animation flat fee
I just cherry-picked some line items from the budget to show you some of the team members (as hard-working Bay Area freelancers) who will need to be compensated for their work efforts. (Please note that the producers are not on this list!)

When our Kickstarter campaign ends on Monday morning, June 7, we will be able to prove to other funders and donors that yes, ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE came in as backers of this new social media experiment! Honestly, it amazes me to this day, and I am energized.

It makes me excited to think that we are part of the next generation of media makers experimenting within this new digital space, and doing what Clay Shirky writes about today in the Wall Street Journal -- “Does the Internet Make You Smarter?”…

“The task before us now is to experiment with new ways of using a medium that is social, ubiquitous, and cheap, a medium that changes the landscape by distributing freedom of the press and freedom of assembly as widely as freedom of speech.”

Hooray!
Helen

Hello friends of Lunch Love Community,

I hear the sounds of the public broadcasting announcers during pledge week…”We need only $1,000 to meet our goal, and only 72 HOURS LEFT to get there. Please help us reach the finish line by going to your keyboards and re-upping, or asking a friend to make a tax deductible contribution and receive a reward for this smart, beautiful and professionally created social media campaign that will reach anyone, anywhere, online who wants to change the way our children eat!”

Whew!

THIS WEEK’S INSPIRATION
Executive Chef Bonnie Christensen for the Berkeley Unified School District, and who appears in the Kickstarter trailer and will be featured in Lunch Love Community writes about her experiences on being a school lunch chef at the Slow Cook blog:
http://www.theslowcook.com/2010/05/12/on-being-a-school-chef/
She concludes passionately:
“The work is hard and dangerous. You better love it if you want to do it. And unlike out on the field, there is no glory, especially in a school lunch program. No one wants to pay for it. No one wants to take time for it. Big companies want to unload their unusable products on us….It goes on and on.”

Well, folks, let’s make Chef Bonnie’s day and show our support for the incredible work she is doing with her staff on behalf of our children. We express it by creating stories where people can see, hear and connect to what she is talking about – from the conflicts to the triumphs.

You are our Producers Circle showing other funders that we have a true and motivated community, caring and wishing to spread the word about this remarkable work. Almost one hundred of you have shown your support for this project – something that is bigger than all of us combined.

Please consider helping us fill in the $1,000 gap in the next 72 hours…

With gratitude, excitement (and relief),
Helen and Sophie

Hello my dear friends,
This Kickstarter media project we are making is a grand experiment in creating a community that is larger than any of us. Thanks to all of YOU, today we have 72 backers who have contributed from $10 to $1000.

Yet, we have only 14 days to go to raise the remaining $2000 to meet our $9000 goal.

This week, we have been out shooting in the garden and cooking classrooms of Berkeley elementary schools. Rivka Mason, gardening teacher at Malcolm X elementary, works with children who love to spend their recess time weeding and watering in this playground paradise they have all created over the years. She tells us to "think small, plant seeds in pots wherever you can, and try, however you can, to introduce children to the pleasures and lessons of working in the dirt and watching their food grow."

We photographed cooking lessons with teacher-chef Carrie Orth this week at John Muir school, as she engaged kindergartners, 3rd, 4th and 5th graders in a variety of lessons by making springtime salads with a fresh herb green goddess dressing and fresh eggs from the school chickens. Everyone was expected to prepare the salads and eat them up. And every child did.

This summer, we promise to turn two years worth of documentary footage into a mosaic of "bite size webisodes" to share freely with anyone, anywhere who wants to use them-- as inspiration, as dialogue, as a way to show and tell about how to get people moving together in a new direction, and change the way our children relate to food. One seed at a time, one bite at a time.

Your investment in "Lunch Love Community" is contributing to the completion of these webisodes by paying for production, for editorial, for a web manager. Real people who are media professionals who also want to see this project get out into the world.

Great media that we give away for free has to be paid for by all of us, in one or another. And whatever you can, please contribute or pass along to someone who you think can become part of this larger community.

We talk about childhood "diabesity" -- and wonder what can we do to help. One way is to reveal and model new behaviors, new expressions, new ways of reaching people -- through intentional pleasure, passion and involvement in hidden or forgotten food ways and transmitting them to children -- the next generation.

Please take a moment to ask your friends to click through to this Kickstarter page. A simple gesture that may change lives we do not even know!

Or click through to our Facebook page and see some snaps I uploaded from the shoots I mention above:
http://bit.ly/9MAAE6

And help us make media work that will travel the world to inspire people everywhere to help change the way all our children eat.

Many thanks from us to you!

Helen De Michiel, Producer & DIrector
Lunch Love Community

P.S. Please remember that all contributions are tax deductible, and the Kickstarter Rewards we offer come straight from the heart.

Thank you “Lunch Love Community” backers for jumping in with us! Sophie and I were talking today about what an amazing experience this is for us as we clear new ground and dig into what I call “Open Space Documentary.” Sounds intriguing, but what is it?

It’s my way of capturing what I want to happen with media projects like this one. I know people like bloggy lists, so here goes one from an upcoming collaborative essay I am writing with my colleague Patty Zimmermann:

Why “OPEN SPACE” For Documentary?

1. It can restore social, human-scaled and local agency in new and unimagined ways. It invites new conversations and behaviors while connecting people. It fights fear with pleasure and fun.

2. It can convene people intentionally around and in real community spaces, offering an experience that reclaims patches of the social media environment from global corporatism.

3. It lives in and evolves through expansive networks, communities and clusters beyond traditional media distribution channels by experimenting with multiple versions and reaching out to contributors across disciplines and generations.

4. It invites media makers and exhibitors to become “context providers” rather than “content providers,” reframing the more fluid movement and interconnections across disciplines and boundaries.

5. It encourages attention to micro-territorial media ecologies where different dialogues, practices and dynamically shifting elements will engage both convener and participants in unanticipated ways.

6. It acknowledges and works within a permeable space in which collaboration, contingency, horizontality, adaptability, decentralization and the migration across media platforms occurs frequently and with force.

We only have $3,000 to go and reach our goal... Please pass this link on to your friends and ask them to become backers of Lunch Love Community tonight. Every amount counts, and it is tax deductible.

Become part of our community and help us close the gap to make new and different kinds of documentary work!

Helen De Michiel