No Sponsership Please

I can’t stand the word sponsorship. I have heard it too many times and too close apart since I have moved back. Most ideas require seed money, or start up capital. Most people are too scared to borrow or ask others for it. So we run to – sponsorship. I can’t imagine the amount of proposals that telecommunication companies receive on a daily basis to projects that do not make sense to what they do asking them to pour seed money into their events, launch parties, gizmo’s, and gadgets. Too often the reply to this is a no, thank you.

So am not sure which is worse, when a project gets turned down, or the fact that they don’t know where to go to gain support for it.

I am now in the process of printing Sketchbook, or accurately figuring it out, and looking to borrow for my first year’s print run. And go figure I am faced with 30 wall blockades that include.

1. You can’t print without a publishing license
2. To print you need 50,000 BD in the bank
3. You need 5 Bahraini partners

So naturally I have been speaking to publishers in my industry and again the word ‘sponsorships’ keeps popping up. I have contacted too many companies that gave me a flat no, seeing they just couldn’t what would be in it for them to fund a culture and arts magazine.

Last week I had a coffee and lunch with sound artist and researcher Hassan Hujairi and his argument was we need to get our ideas to be self efficient, to fund themselves and where we don’t depend on  anyone but ourselves.  And we ended up discussing systems like the British Arts Council, and how you were able to fill forms and proposals online for a review board if you needed support of space.

Another great idea that I discovered recently is Kickstarter.com ,  a funding platform for creative projects.. Though am pretty sure it only works in the US, How it works is you send an application video and post it on your profile page within Kickstarter. Every idea has a funding goal, and if they reach that goal, all the backers credit cards get charged with amount contributed. If they do not reach the goal before the time it expires no one gets charged.

Maybe I am part of the problem, trying to seek sponsorship for my project despite advising not too, maybe as Hassan suggested we need to create ideas with structure that can self fund themselves. Or maybe we can use methods like Kickstarter to get the funding that we need. Or maybe we need a CREATIVE MINISTRY, an organization that funds creative ideas in our districts.

What are other alternatives are there to fund our ideas?