Wine For Water Event Report
// June 15th, 2009 // No Comments » // Wine For Water
I spent the day at CAWST taking part in their annual Learning Exchange – a gathering of engineers, project managers and volunteers from CAWST’s network all over the world. HIV/AIDS dominated the day’s sessions, but Wine for Water was the talk of the breaks.
Everyone’s eyes went wide when they learned how much we generated in one evening. “You want a job?” someone said. (I don’t think they were kidding.)
Wine for Water, in its original conception, was a little rent-raiser for Melanie The Volunteer. As I’ve said before, your mortgage payments don’t just stop because you’re off saving the world. But I never expected more than 20 people and maybe fifteen hundred bucks.
My expectations were spectacularly off the mark.
We generated over $7,000 – more than FOUR TIMES what I’d anticipated. At the final tally, we had 48 guests, including CAWST CEO Camille Dow-Baker and some of Calgary’s most affluent and generous citizens. We had more than thirty auction items donated, one item selling for a whopping $1,650 at the live auction. Our event sponsors were floored – they had no idea it was going to be that well-attended or that successful.
To be honest, none of us did.
Generating $7,000 was beyond my imagination and it’s now left me with a bit of a conundrum. As I said, it was intended as a wee little rent-raiser to help me cover my costs, and so when I say “This is bigger than me,” I mean it. What we created is way larger in scope than any of us intended and I no longer feel comfortable using the funds for myself.
So, now I’m in the process of figuring out what to do with this amazing, powerful chunk of change. (I use the word ‘change’ intentionally.)
One of the ideas is to put it towards supporting the as-yet-unfunded Nepal portion of the project. I spoke with the Nepalese contact today and he’d be thrilled to have us come and tell his country’s part of the story.
However, I had another idea over the weekend, which basically consisted of a series of insights going in this direction: Why is it only these countries? Why is it only two artists working in two media (words and photos)? What about a network of artists documenting this story in different forms all over the world?
Suffice it to say this falls into the Big Ideas That Need Time To Brew category.
Regardless, I wanted to share all that in the name of transparency. And I’ll continue to do so as my thoughts and ideas clarify, but I have to say, NOT making rent has never felt so good!
