The People
The Emergency Circus, a division of Patch Adams’ Gesundheit Institute and a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization, uplifts the hurt and healing with entertainment, inspiration, and empathy. Our all volunteer run coalition of circus artists administers joy to children’s wards, senior centers, homeless shelters, prisons, and even to the streets. Wherever health and happiness struggle, we go.
The Project
We are raising funds to create and tour a healing circus experience to those in need between New Orleans, New York, Mexico, and Canada, this spring.
The Plan
Beginning on April 11th a few chosen Emergency Circus Technicians will meet in New Orleans to begin training for and development of a creative circus program. While seeking to uplift and inspire through pure entertainment, the show will also be designed to strengthen communities through interactive play and educate through spectacle. The performance will include skits and songs subtlety dealing with issues ranging from diabetes to depression and will create opportunities for interactive community building.
Workshops including puppetry, ukulele, clowning, juggling, and mime will also be offered along with the show. Audiences will be encouraged and allowed to join the circus showing the skills they've learned.
The Passageway
From the heart of our home base New Orleans, we'll take 7 circus professionals to healthcare facilities, homeless shelters, and the like across North America. We'll share our program along the way to the inner cities of Washington D.C., Philadelphia, and NYC performing at low income children's centers and for the developmentally disabled. At the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia, we'll meet up with Dr. "Patch" Adams and other care giving clowns to further hone our skills at healing trauma through humor. After consulting with the experts It's straight through the Bible Belt of America to infuse rural communities with inspiration and new skills. We'll do work along both sides of the U.S. Mexican border sharing ideas on human rights and acceptance. From there we'll tour juvenile detention centers and adult prisons up the coast. Uniting with America's Got Talent phenomenon and meditation magician, Special Head, we'll bring healing happiness to the streets of L.A. After ending our tour in Vancouver, Canada, we'll join forces with The New Old Time Chautauqua, a non-profit circus with a 30 year history and over 50 volunteers, to spread more happiness and healing through rural Montana.
Not only will we bring this healing entertainment to institutions in need, we will also bring surprise joy to supermarkets, gas stations, malls, and anywhere we can to break up monotony and encourage connection over consumer isolation.
The Proceeds
Your donations will:
- Convert the Jambulance: (our retrofitted ambulance tour vehicle) to run on donated waste vegetable oil, meaning we will rarely have to buy expensive diesel fuel, freeing us from the most expensive cost of touring. The high initial expense of this conversion will pay for itself in fuel costs in less than 9000 miles, creating economic sustainability. Waste vegetable oil exhaust contains less particulate matter, hydrocarbons, and carbon monoxide than diesel. This fact adds to the earth's environmental sustainability.
- Feed the Circus. Like all people, circus people need nourishment. We'll be able to feed the performers at a low cost with satisfying communal meals we can share with the audience.
- Fix Emergencies. A fund for inevitable breakdowns, flat tires, fuel filters, crushed clown noses, etc.
- Ship your Prizes. The manufacturing and shipping of your capes, balls clubs, and other Kickstarter costs are budgeted in too.
The Prizes
We may not have a brand new invention that will revolutionize the way you screwdrive but we have come up with some creative incentives designed to help you become a Circus Superhero, enabling you to run away with the circus and start spreading that joy yourself.
The Surplus
There's no way to overfund kindness. Whatever donations we receive beyond our goal will go directly to making our artistic endeavors more sustainable so we might reach a greater audience and have a larger impact on the world. Some of our ultimate goals should we break through the thermometer include a drop down stage on the side of the Jambulance allowing us to pull up and explode a show at any event, rally, park, or street corner. Also we have plans to purchase solar panels for the roof of the Jambulance to power lighting and sound equipment. We're also in the market for another tour vehicle so we might take a few more folks and things. Heck, If you help get this project viral, we can finally buy that plane that flies us direct to where circus is needed most on the planet.
Provide more
- Share it on Facebook, Twitter, your blog, in sidewalk chalk, air writing, listservs, anywhere. For a full press release e-mail. emergencycircus@gmail.com.
- Wish list Check out ours at emergencycircus.com to find out what else we need besides money. It's fun to trade help for goodness' sake!
Thank You
For your interest, your help, and your belief in the value of love. This world is in a state of Emergency, starving for joyful interaction and empathy. You feed it hope.
Risks and challenges
This project comes with many challenges including booking, lodging, acquiring fuel, maintaining the Jambulance, and feeding our crew but with our combined experience and skills we will be able to embrace these challenges with ease.
Our performers are used to this exact kind of work. Collectively we've clowned and cared from Alaska to Peru to Russia to Jordan, you name it, with long existing reputable groups like The New Old Time Chautauqua, The Gesundheit! Institute, Clowns Without Borders, Common Vision's Fruit Tree Tour, Sustainable Living Roadshow, Dreamtime Circus, and others. We're experts in handling budgets, booking, and cooking for 70-plus folks. With this project we only have to manage 7 well-mannered circus freaks.
We have a network of connections and contributors across the nation poised to help us with places to stay and venues to play. Among our ranks we have mechanics with extensive experience traveling long distances on waste vegetable oil. We've budgeted in a relief valve for inevitable Jambulatory hang ups along the way and we're going the extra mile to outfit the Jambulance right, enabling us to clean the oil thoroughly, being extra kind to the fuel injection pump and so on. We are purchasing quality parts and using new inventive practices, like choosing clear hoses for easy fuel line trouble shooting. We are collecting sponsorships from restaurant chains with clean waste vegetable oil across the country to donate to our fuel, ensuring we won't run out of juice.
And we have you, people like you who care about us and the things we are trying to achieve in the world. We know that following your dreams and doing good comes with all kinds of unimaginable rewards. Help exists. Thank you.
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Funding period
- (33 days)