Whew! We can’t believe it’s over! In early November, we dove headlong into the Willamette Week Give!Guide campaign. For seven whole weeks, we drew relentlessly on our vibrant community to lend a hand to our vision of putting arts education at the hands of every single K-8 student in Portland. And on January 1st, we emerged to a truly inspiring sight:
188 donors had pledged their commitment to the future of arts education in this region by helping us to raise a grand total of $8,590! That’s 30% more than we raised through the Give!Guide in 2010, for the record. And if you’re a competitive type, you’ll be happy to know that 80 of those individuals bumped us up into the Top Ten organizations for donors under the age of 36 in the final stretch. We can expect to tack a $500 bonus onto our total from that triumph.
On behalf of Right Brain staff and teaching artists, K-8 teachers and students around the Portland area, THANK YOU for your support during this campaign! We are so excited to dedicate EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR raised directly to our work serving local teachers and artists through professional development, community engagement and creating imaginative learning experiences at new schools in 2012-13. We can’t believe how lucky we are to have such a committed community of arts education advocates on our side.
Speaking of luck … there was lots of it to go around in the form of enticing local incentives throughout the course of the campaign. From tickets to the Portland Art Museum to free wine tastings to Oregon Ducks-bedazzled keyboards, many of our donors were rewarded handsomely for their contributions. Congratulations to the following winners:
- Sarah C. won a $25 gift certificate to The Secret Society Lounge
- Gregg S. won a pair of tickets to the Portland Art Museum
- Libbi J. won four passes to the Portland Art Museum and four passes to the Lan Su Chinese Garden
- Kylee B. won tickets to the Portland Opera, Portland Baroque Orchestra and the Oregon Symphony
- Angela A. won two $20 gift cards to Veritable Quandary, monthly bread from Pearl Bakery and a free wine tasting at Bergstrom Wines in Newberg
- Sheryl H. won passes to the Nike, Adidas and Columbia Sportswear employee stores, as well as wireless keyboards decked out in honor of Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers
- Amber H. won a $20 gift certificate to I’ve Been Framed
And now for the five lucky recipients of the big-deal prizes from the final raffle…
- Bettie D. won dinner for two with wine pairings at Genoa, Portland’s legendary Italian restaurant
- Scott K. scored two tickets to see the Portland Timbers in the 2012 season
- Diane W. won two tickets to see the Harlem Globetrotters at the Rose Garden arena
- Ben M. and Jodi H. both won admission to our annual three-day Imagine This! seminar for arts educators
Winners all around! But we’d like to end this whirlwind by acknowledging the many non-monetary riches this campaign produced. Along the way, we heard moving testimonials of those who gave (one donor called Right Brain “the smartest, most collaborative, most comprehensive initiative for arts education that Portland has ever seen”). We attracted out-of-town donors who tapped into our message and felt compelled to give despite their physical distance from us. And we generated quantifiable proof that we live in a community that is unwilling to see the arts fall from the menu of public school curriculum. Here’s to a new year full of healthy, happy right brains.
Another huge thank you from The Right Brain Initiative!
