RAISE FUNDS TO BUY
FELLOW PENNSYLVANIANS CLEAN WATER TO DRINK!
UPDATES IN RED!
As you know, families across the drilling region in PA have no clean drinking water as a result of fracking. All too often, they are left to their own devices to pay for replacement water. Our government – and the richest companies in the history of corporate power – have turned their backs on these families. Yet there has been little media attention devoted to this outrage.
During the post-PA Dems brainstorming meetings, we came up with an idea for bringing attention to this issue. We thought it would be powerful and effective to hold very humble bake sales, lemonade stands, yard sales, and other similarly “humble” events across PA to raise funds to buy replacement water for our fellow Pennsylvanians.
We might call it something catchy … like:
localSTAND
… because it is left to US to take a stand for our neighbors
when they have been abandoned by their own government.
NOTE 7/21/13: We’ve come up with a great logo!
In addition to raising much-needed funds for families who need them, these “stands”, in their simple humility, will shine a light on how little the affected families have been helped by those with the power and the resources and the responsibility to help them.
The idea is to treat these events like the small fundraising stands we’re all familiar with from PTA, church charities and baseball teams. They’re always very matter-of-fact events highlighting a community need, with the issues BEHIND the need being a more subtle addition.
We’ll create a simple handout about the need for water for our neighbors and where people can send additional donations, should they choose to.
And the very best thing about our “localSTANDS”?
Anyone can do one.
We encourage any individual or small collection of people to get a table or set up a stand at their local farmers’ market, community fair, church bizarre etc. A stand could even be set up on your front lawn if you have enough passing traffic … or at a supermarket (ala the Girl Scouts) if you can get permission.
NOTE 7/21/2013: We’ve started listing events on a Google map. Send your events to berksgastruth@gmail.com to be added!
You can submit your “charity” events to the announcements section of your local papers and pennysavers in advance. After the event, you can submit a write-up and photos of the event (we’ll provide the template if you like) to your local features’ editors. It’s often hard to get press about our issues, but announcements and feature stories will get in the papers much more easily. And the humility of how we are going about raising these funds provides what should be only the BEGINNING of a human interest story that will hopefully generate interest in the REAL story of what these families are going through.
Of course, you’ll need to bake cupcakes, make lemonade or recruit others to do that and work the table the day of the event. But what fun!
Finally – and this is really important – we’ll ask you to register your event with us so that we can tally how much we have collected from our STANDS across Pennsylvania over the course of the month so that we can send out a release about our statewide results.
Let us know if you’d like to TAKE A STAND in your area
by emailing berksgastruth@gmail.com.
As we have more details about how we can make the message of these events the most effective, we’ll send them out to you.