As many of you know, Southtown is made up of a number of volunteers and businesses that work hard to make a dream of having a music, arts, and skating community in an otherwise neglected area of Springfield. For as many years as Black Sheep has been around, we have been a dedicated group of volunteers who have never earned a dime for providing an all ages venue and safe space, but instead have poured out lots of our own time and money in order to keep what we have going alive.
In more recent months, the costs of keeping our spaces running and our buildings maintained have become more than problematic. Black Sheep itself is currently facing insurance costs that can not be met with our usual $5 cover charge, on top of hefty electric bills from our new heating/cooling system. Any upgrades to sound or minor changes to our space have had to be done out of pocket by a number of volunteers because the money taken in at shows simply is not enough.
We are quickly running out of options and new ways to try to stay afloat in Southtown and are constantly looking for more permanent solutions to ensure that we can continue for more years to come. At this time we are ready to start a new non-for-profit Southtown organization that will represent all of the Southtown businesses and our community. The goal of this new organization will be to preserve and better our side of town as well as take on new projects and improvements through grant writing and more organized volunteer work.
Forming a new non-for-profit however is not easy. In order to file as an official non-for-profit we will need close to $1,000 and also time to be reviewed. Because of these ever-growing costs of our mission, we can not pull off doing this alone. We are turning to crowd funding and a new Kickstarter campaign.
With your help this project will provide funding to:
– Cover the costs of fees to file a new Southtown non-for-profit organization
– Cover new high-risk insurance costs at Black Sheep
– Preserve and convert video footage from Skank Skate’s history
Our goal for this campaign is to raise a minimum of $5,000 in 60 days. This may seam a lot to ask for, but this is the minimum that we feel “Project Southtown” will need to get off the ground so we can take on new levels of neighborhood revitalization. We truly believe that with your help we can reach our goal and continue to raise funds to improve our spaces.
Dumb Records 