New Direction

Hi all!

It’s been a while since Ive posted in the community but I wanted to share a development on Ballet Rising as I see a lot of potential use for ILP in our new strategy.

Ballet Rising was originally conceived as a means of helping ballet artists in places around the world that have little or no history of ballet in their communities, by making the global community aware of their unique stories through media. Recently we’ve decided to become a grant program and we are in the process of becoming a non-profit based in The Netherlands. We aim to raise money from donations and government programs to help ballet schools and artists in places like Africa, the Middle-East, South Asia, and more. Our main goal is to help schools buy proper floors, choreographers find costumes, help students with scholarships, etc. As a part of all of this we still aim to continue to make media about the developments around all of this, as that informs our donors, brings in new fans, and helps connect people and encourage collaborations, but we want to have a more direct impact.

Our original grant from the GftW was to experiment with web monetization and micropayments through the media we created. Now I believe that is still a highly interesting area but I want to start looking into how we can send and receive payments, make donations, enhance crowdfunding, and host of other ideas current dance projects are working on with the use of ILP. Im looking forward to continuing to be a member of the Web Monetization Community and looking into these areas further.

We are still in the application process of becoming a non-profit but we felt an urgent need to get one of our first projects off the ground.

Today we are launching a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe to help an inspirational artist in his quest to become a beacon of hope for the arts in his home country of Syria. Karmil is trying to take advantage of a scholarship to study dance in Switzerland and one-day use his skills to help others. Please take a moment to like, share, comment, and consider donating to his cause.

Thank you all so much for anything you can offer and I look forward to discussing ideas and plans with all of you soon!

Best regards

Casey Herd