It’s been a minute since we have been able to report with any updates for Project Southtown, the newest effort to revitalize and better the historic Southtown nieghborhood that houses Black Sheep, Skank Skates, Dumb Records, South Town Studio, and Boof City. Thanks to the support we’ve received so far, we’ve had the fortune of being able to use the donations we gained from the kickstarter campaign for much needed projects and updates. As you can see in the picture above, Dumb Records is now graced with a new sign, built and hung by Project Southtown volunteers! This addition to the Dumb Records store front has already started increasing foot traffic in the store and will hopefully increase business overall. A new sign is only one of the many positive upgrades that our awesome volunteers have been putting time and energy into!

Since June, we’ve been able to give some special attention to the property and businesses that reside within it. This includes being able to renew fire extinguishers, obtain dehumidifiers as well as cigarette receptacles for the parking lot. Black Sheep Cafe now has new speakers, which has made the show going experience that much better for listeners! When the kickstarter campaign was finalized, we were able to give back to donors by purchasing  Project Southtown t-shirts and jars for gifting honey from our bee hives in return for gaining their support! We’ve recently prepared a wall of fame stating all of the names of people who donated. Keep your eyes peeled because that will be hung in a prominent spot on the property soon! We also now have new, hand built fences guarding our pollination garden next to dumb records and our back parking lot entrance, which are both wonderful additions to the space. Other things we’ve been working on is preparing the wall on the side of Dumb Records for a new mural, which you may remember reading about in the preliminary Project Southtown update post we made back in June. After gaining the ability to purchase primer and paint, the wall is ready to go and we already have local artist Bill Crook drawing up preliminary sketches! What a treat!

This mural we are planning on is not the only large scale achievement we’ve gained from the kickstarter donations. We were able to use the funds to file for official state and federal non-profit status, which are almost finalized, as well as to catch up with the rising rate of city property taxes. We now have options to make plans for the future so make sure to watch for more developments. Also, keep your eyes peeled for membership letters that will be coming out this December! In their contents you’ll be able to learn more about being a member of Project Southtown, what that means, the benefits you’ll receive by doing so and what you can to do contribute! Everyone is welcome to become a member and we are excited to delve into the future of Southtown as a community! If you are interested in getting involved more with Project Southtown, email George Sinclair at georgeid2@yahoo.com and we would be happy to welcome you. Otherwise, stay tuned for more Project Southtown updates!

Welcome to the very first of hopefully many monthly updates on Project Southtown – a new revitalization effort for our corner of the world located at 11th and South Grand streets in Springfield.

This past month the Project Southtown Kickstarter campaign ended with a successful $7,100+ raised. Yesterday we held an open Black Sheep roundtable meeting to talk about some immediate projects we felt need to be taken on to get the ball rolling on Project Southtown and many more projects to come. Some of those immediate projects included:

– Prepping the recently demolished wall on the side of Dumb Records (pictured above) and getting ready for a new Southtown mural.
– Purchasing new outdoor ashtrays to use instead of buckets to clean up cigarette butts.
– Purchasing new woodchips to go underneath benches behind Black Sheep.
– Building new signage for the front of Dumb Records.
– Purchasing a bike rack for public use.
– A tab on our site for Project Southtown (a separate site will come later).

We agreed on having a workday to start prepping the wall (pictured above) this upcoming Saturday. We plan on being outside working from 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm, and there will also be a vegan potluck at 3:00 pm, so anyone is welcome to come out and help us work, and enjoy some free food!

Incentives for Project Southtown are also already being gathered and shipped out. We will be contacting individual donors this month to hunt down shirt sizes, and Brian Galecki is still working up a t-shirt design for Project Southtown.

Digitizing of the Skank Skates VHS tapes are already underway, with one full half hour clip already done and up online right here. Other clips are also being worked on, as well as a website where we can host all of the video tapes in an organized fashion. Some paperwork has also already been submitted for Project Southtown’s new non-for-profit status- a process which may still take up to six months to go through. However while we are waiting for that the project will still be continuing at full speed.

Earlier this week, our two-month long campaign to Kickstart a new project (Project Southtown), ended with a successful haul of donations that passed the $7,100 mark- well over our minimum goal of $2,000! Of course we want to give a big THANK YOU to all who donated, shared, and were at all supportive throughout the duration of our campaign.

Now that the campaign is done and over, we are going to be kicking Project Southtown into high gear, in our mission to restore a lot of the old Skank Skates videos and also file for non-for-profit status. For those of you closely following the project here is what you can expect in the near future:

– Be on the lookout for another State-Journal Register article in the paper tomorrow about the project’s completion.
– For those of you who donated to the Kickstarter, your incentives will be shipping out throughout the month of July. If you live in Springfield we may be getting ahold of you with incentives to avoid shipping.
– Our next roundtable meeting will be focused a lot on Project Southtown. We will be meeting at Black Sheep on Sunday, July 5th at 7:00 pm. Everyone is welcome to come.
– We will be giving out monthly updates on Project Southtown on our site, as well as through email lists. Updates will be focused on the status of the non-for-profit, as well as going into depth on where the campaign money is being spent. Expect the first big update at the beginning of July.

It looks like we have reached the final week of the two month-long run of our Project Southtown Kickstarter Campaign- a campaign we have started to preserve some of the history of our music community and also to secure much of our future. Currently the project has over 100 donors, and we have passed up our minimum goal of $5,000. Any money raised in addition to our goal is also extremely helpful in the project and is greatly appreciated.

Donate to the Project Southtown Kickstarter and watch the video right here. The campaign will be ending in one week on Thursday, June 25th at 4:00 pm. Incentives for all of the donors will be shipping out in July, and we will also be giving at least one update a month on the project after the campaign has ended.