This December there will be a festive and fun series of events in Second Life called “Winterfest,” happening in regions all over the grid. The Nonprofit Commons will be participating by inviting the public to participate in entertaining and awareness raising activities on our sims.
Brena Benoir, one of the volunteer organizers of our Winterfest activities, shares this information about how your organization can participate! Give it a read and please respond to her request for information as soon as possible.
Zinnia was able to share the theme for our Winterfest involvement as a Nonprofit Commons community last week. The theme is “Wishes Granted: Stories of Positive Impact”. In a snow covered setting, visitors will discover huge books that tell real life fairy tales. Those stories are about how your organization has had a positive impact on the lives of others. Inside those books will be insightful notecards, landmarks, and gifts. We have the opportunity as a community to impact the lives of people who are on Second Life and those of the Real World every day, many of whom do not ever log in to SL.
To give you a little example, PFH has a creative arts program, ARTC (Achieving Recovery Through Creativity) in our treatment centers. The program is designed to use any mean of creativity to help clients work on difficult issues and feelings expression. This program presents opportunities to people to address internal, core issues without having to try to articulate in words what they might be feeling. It allows for building of skills to aid in recovery efforts and allows for building of self esteem and confidence when they see they can accomplish things.
We draw largely upon donations to make this program available. Donations come from community agencies, citizens, other organizations, etc. During SLCC 2011 PFH was the recipient organization of the Artathon held by Filthy Fluno and WInter Nightfire. The efforts of these two very talented artists to create art and make it available for sale both at the Convention and in-world led to a very successful Artathon. The funds raised during the Artathon and during a presentation party here in SL, led to a donation in the neighborhoods of approximately $800 to the ARTC program. This makes it possible to purchase supplies for the program and equipment to enhance the talents of our young people to aid in their recovery efforts.
SL made it possible to connect the efforts of Real World artists with programs like our’s at PFH that encourage development of talents and skills and promote the sense of creativity as a healthy part of daily life. As a result, Filthy, Winter, and the persons who donated and purchased artwork have touched the lives of many in ways that are too numerable to even track. We cannot thank Filthy and Winter enough for their time and efforts to support ARTC.
With that being said, we want to you to be a part of the Wishes Granted Event, to know what positive impacts your organizations are having as a result of being a part of SL. We would like to feature as many organizations as possible during the Winterfest event. Therefore we need your help! As this is a large scale event and requires much planning and work to get it off the ground, we have set some firm guidelines to help keep us on track to the event. Please, please respect all deadlines as there is much work to be done outside of SL to make this event happen and the holidays are quickly approaching. With that being said, here is what we need from you as representatives of your organizations:
- by 11/11/11 we need a full list of any organizations that are committing to participate in this community-wide and grid-wide event. We need the name of the organization or group and a contact person.
- by 11/20/11 we will need a FULL perm logo, 1/2 page of 12pt font text with highlights about the positive impacts to use in the larger book. The goal of this section should be what will help draw a reader in and make them want to click the book to learn more about your organization. Also we will need 2 High-res photos (1024×1024) to embed in the book texture as well.
The above items need to be emailed to brenabenoir@gmail.com and renneemiko@gmail.com. It is very important that these things be emailed since much work has to be done in photoshop programs to prepare the textures for the books. It is also extremely important to abide by the guidelines as some people will be on holiday and we will have limited time frames to get this accomplished.
Next area where will need assistance is PR. We are looking for persons who can assist with PR on their personal channels through Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, and other Social Media Outlets. We are looking for persons who are willing to share event times and special functions that will be happening during Winterfest here in NPC such as random snowball fights, Wharf Ratz, CommonGround, and other events. If you are interested in assisting with this, please email us with channels you would be willing to use.
Thank you for your positive and active participation in this Nonprofit Commons community event!
Written by: rikomatic