I, unfortunately, missed the first class, but this gave me time to read!  Luckily, one of the readings for this week just so happened to align with my eventual job (spoiler alert).

Right now, we don’t have a whole lot of time to raise funds.  While the festival still feels lightyears away, two months will make it difficult to secure any kind of monetary funding, especially from international or government entities (which is upsetting, given we have chosen to be “Melbourne International Youth Film Festival”), and according to this weeks reading, festivals that are less than 5 years old are 88% funded by foreign funds and donors.  At current, I’m not expecting we’ll raise any money through sponsorship, but that doesn’t mean we won’t try!

When I arrived, I found out that no one has taken on the task of hitting up alcohol companies for free booze.  Apparently, there was some kind of moral quandary in doing this.  Personally, I disagree with the existence of alcohol in the first place and think that making money off of it is inherently wrong (I am aware that I sound like some fundamentalist Christian or something and feel the need to clarify that I do partake in the occasional bev sesh) so I figure that getting free booze is not only morally ok but also social justice.  I started out by looking up other festivals in Melbourne and seeing who sponsors them, and adding them to a spreadsheet that was helpfully already made up last week by Sean.  I also looked up other Melbourne-based breweries.

On top of this, I’m currently writing the sponsorship package we’ll be sending off to potential partners.  Again, Sean had already started this, so I’ll be using some of his wording in the end product.  A lot of this package will be modeled off the Women’s Film Festival sponsorship package from Indiana.  This should hopefully be finished by next weeks class so we can start sending them off ASAP.  The spreadsheet has other potential sponsors that we can try as well for other things like promotion and maybe even money.

RESOURCES
Matthea de Jong and María Carrión, “Adding Water to the Soup Pot: Finding Resources for Your Festival (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.” in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, Human Rights Film Network, Prague, 2015, pp. 115-129.