Chicken Controversy? The Old Meeting House? Berlin Pond Drinking Water issue? Tampon Tax? You bet.
If funded, we have a young writers who have these topics covered. Contributors include students from Montpelier High School, U-32 and East Montpelier Elementary School. In Addition, we will have other features, including poetry and art....read on......
A New Breeze - For Youth, By Youth
We are creating two new "for youth, by youth" four-page journalism projects named The Breeze. One will come out on June 16 as the school year ends, and the second will come out in our August "Back to School" issue of The Bridge. Both will be inserted and mailed in The Bridge — a parent publication that was founded in 1993 as a free, independent and local community newspaper.
Some of the stories have been developed as part of the local school system's Community Based Learning program. Two students have already written the feature stories we will place in The Breeze.
One story, written by Hannah Eschelbach, grade 12, of Barre, is about having the responsibility tending chickens at Montpelier High School. The writer compares the outdoor hands-on experience with her previous school where they did not go outside for science.
Another story, written by 10th grader Nathan Grutchfield of Montpelier, is about the 50th anniversary of a community church in East Montpelier, Vermont. The building itself is even older. From Wikipedia: "Union Meetinghouse is a historic meeting house on Center Road in East Montpelier, Vermont. It was built in 1823 and served as a house of worship for the Methodists and was used for town government meetings." Now, according to their blogspot: "The Old Meeting House is a community church with strong denominational ties to the United Church of Christ." Nathan has strong ties to The Old Meeting House.
As the project moves forward, students will also request content from fellow students, such as book reviews, crossword puzzles, photos and drawings.
Since Nathan is our summer intern as well, this campaign will fund one four page issue of The Breeze at the beginning of the summer - as a culmination of his community based learning - and another at the end as a culmination of his summer internship.
COST:
Each additional 4-page spread costs $1,500 to print, so the total cost for 2 spreads amounts to $3,000.
Additionally, these issues are mailed, so The Breeze will contribute toward the over $900 per mailed issue cost to send free to everyone with an 05602 zipcode (Montpelier, East Montpelier, Calais and Berlin).
We also need to mail out copies of the issues offered as rewards to people outside our area. This could cost up to $100.
We anticipate the cost, including printing, postage and incidentals, to be at least $4,500.00.
The Breeze is a project of a community based newspaper by grownups for grownups called The Bridge.
Risks and challenges
If we are successfully funded, the risks include illness of one of the key staffers (the person who does layout, or the person who pulls together content). Usually, though, in past experience, these people have worked from hospital beds and home beds on their laptops, so this could be overcome as long as they are living and breathing.
Also, the project depends on technology. We send the final publication digitally to the printer. Rarely, but occasionally, a server goes down. We can always drive to the printer (an hour away) with the finished project on a thumb drive. Not ideal, but doable.
Our previous two Kickstarter projects came together and we fulfilled the rewards, which included cupcakes, Nat's voice on the donor's answering machine and a final party. This time the rewards are primarily more directly related to the published project. This may change as the project goes along and we come up with some interesting new rewards.
The last project of The Breeze, was successfully completed, but the cost was underestimated by over $2,000. So this time I am factoring that in.
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Funding period
- (27 days)