Proposal: Big Class Boston

Alaina Gurdak — 1st place $1,055

Describe your project.
Big Class Boston connects public school students with creative adults to create collaborative books for the community. The structure of the project is simple: students write their own imaginative fiction, and area artists create illustrations for their stories. A compilation of their creative teamwork is published as a book and presented during a book release event. Each student and artist that participates receives a complimentary copy of their book, while additional copies are sold during the book release event and/or at local bookstores as a way of engaging the larger community.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
The funds from this grant will be used to cover the cost of printing the books, and allow us to purchase promotional materials for the book release event. Any additional funds would be used to get us started on our next Big Class Boston book project.

Why and to whom is your project important?
Big Class Boston is focused on expanding the classroom through a simple but poignant call for collaboration. This creative process empowers writing and artistic collaboration between students from public school to art school, while also connecting with the community at large. With the help of some amazing students and talented volunteers, Big Class Boston hopes to show the public what can happen when people (regardless of age) work together.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
The next Big Class Boston book project will be completed at the end of May, to celebrate the nearness of summer for the participating public school students.

Proposal: Freak Flag

Anya Kanevsky

Describe your project.
Our goal (our dream, really!) is to publish a free, independent quarterly newspaper in Boston. We’re calling it Freak Flag. Our project serves two purposes: to showcase the varied musical, artistic, journalistic and literary talent thriving in Boston, and to act as a resource for information (and, we hope, entertainment) to locals and passers-through.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
If awarded a grant, we would use the money to print the inaugural issue of Freak Flag. We are also planning a benefit show to supplement cost of printing. Though we are not opposed to traditional advertising, we feel it will be easier to get local businesses on board once our idea is a tangible piece of media and hope to run our first issue ad-free. We are working with a local printer in Saugus, Massachusetts. The total cost of printing the first issue would be $698.

Why and to whom is your project important?
We grew up here, we love it here, but we’ve always felt like something was missing. The various (and often incredible) scenes are scattered at best, and transient at worst. Merging DIY ethics with our interests in the craft of traditional publishing, we hope to make the Boston scene relevant in a national dialogue, and give the talent in this city the respect it has always deserved.

We hope to add to the voices of existing publications in Boston: we feel that the heavy-hitters (like the Weekly Dig and the Phoenix) don’t always represent the scenes that we experience in this city. When they do report on what’s going on underground, it can feel like secondhand news. At the same time, we are to work with fellow small publications: we are collaborating on content with Counter Cultural Compass, Primordial Sounds, the Dreamhouse Collective, Boston Hassle, alongside original contributions from local artists and writers.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
Over the last six months we have been collecting and commissioning artwork and writing for our first issue. We expect to have printed and distributed the first issue by the time the next Feast Mass meets.

Proposal: Facing Flaws

Leslie Condon, Elizabeth Menges & Bevan Weissman

Describe your project.
We will create a series of detailed rubber casts of body parts that provoke body image insecurities. We will interview volunteers about the relationships they have with specific areas of their bodies before and after making casts of those areas. To ensure a diverse pool of participants, we will reach out to friends and acquaintances and post public calls. The casts will be anonymously displayed in a public space. Written excerpts from interviews will accompany the casts.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
Grant money will be used to buy materials: burlap, plaster, Smooth-on silicone.

Why and to whom is your project important?
This project will benefit participants and the broader community by demystifying shared physical insecurities and promoting a broader range of what is acceptable to be seen or embraced. Through the process of making the casts, participants can gain a great sense of self-awareness, self-esteem, and improved body image. After the exhibition, the casts will be returned to the individuals to honor their participation and to bring the project full circle. We will organize panel discussions at the exhibition venues with art therapists and psychologists to encourage an open, healthy dialogue about the art that reaches beyond the immediate participants. Our long term goal is to structure the project as a traveling exhibition. So far we have two confirmed spaces: Gallery 263 in Cambridge and the Somerville Public Library.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
We expect to have made a minimum of 12 casts and have secured exhibition dates and venues.

Proposal: Free Hands presents The Three Blessed Brothers

Alexandra Herryman

Describe your project.
The Three Blessed Brothers is a live tall tale performance about three young men on a journey to discover the world outside their small home. The play uses Native American folklore, original songs, and puppetry to tell a story about teamwork, helping your neighbors and the importance of family and community. The performance runs about one hour and is appropriate for ages four and up. Free Hands, the producing organization, intends to tour The Three Blessed Brothers around Boston-area libraries and other cultural venues. Our first performance will be at the Roslindale Branch Library on May 7 as an alternative to the library’s Toddler Movie Hour, and will be offered free of charge to area families.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
A grant from Feast Mass would cover the cost of building the puppets, costuming the performers (and the puppets), and constructing the set. Our first completed puppet, for example, cost approximately $50 insupplies, such as glue, paint, and paper maché, and we expect that each of the remaining six puppets will cost the same.

Why and to whom is your project important?
“The Three Blessed Brothers” serves a community hungry for engaging, thoughtful, and live children’s programming. In the 21st century it is easy to place a child in front of a screen to absorb content; it is much rarer that children learn important social and community lessons from an interactive live performer. The Roslindale Branch library reached out to us to with a goal to fill what they saw as a need for this kind of children’s programming, and we will to help them achieve that goal.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
By the next Feast Mass, we will have performed The Three Blessed Brothers publicly (for no admission fee) at least twice, reaching an anticipated audience of 100–150 children and their families. Additionally, we will be left with a completely realized and built puppet show that can live on and entertain families for years to come.

Proposal: Human Foosball

Jerry Reilly

Describe your project.
Foosball is the table soccer game with movable poles and spinning soccer players. Human Foosball is the same game writ large and featuring human children hanging from movable bars kicking wildly. We'll build the game, recruit the children and unveil the maiden game with a splash in some prominent spot in the city.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
We need the Feast Mass cash to buy supplies—steel poles, bearings, lumber and misc hardware. With a Feast Mass grant, 10 lucky children will be able to compete in the first ever Human Foosball game, and countless onlookers will be able to be doubled over with laughter while it happens.

Why and to whom is your project important?
As creators of the Museum of Bad Art, King Pong, Disposable Theatre, and the Summer of Wuv, we know we have what it takes to create a contraption for endangering children and amusing the public.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
By next Feast Mass we will have built Human Foosball, recruited young players and publicly staged the first ever Human Foosball competition in a public space in Boston—with plenty of media in attendance.

Proposal: It's in the Mail: Using Mail Art to Connect and Empower

Anna Mudd

Describe your project.
Our project is a series of workshops run by the Papercut Zine Library focused on mail and the postal system as a medium for independent print media, political activism, personal expression and communication. “Participatory, democratic, personal and expressive, as a form of artwork, Mail Art is sent, given or exchanged via the postal service.” Mail art transforms pieces of mail into art objects through the inclusion of collage, drawing, and other visual and sculptural enhancements.

Workshop #1: Speak Truth to Power (through the mail)
This workshop will be focused on mail as political activism, inviting participants to create mail art to send to individuals and groups within political, corporate, commercial, and civic power structures.

Workshop #2: Pen (pals) are mightier than the sword
Drawing on the work of mail artists ABC and Black and Pink, this workshop will focus on the role of mail in connecting to members of our community to silenced and marginalized communities such as incarcerated individuals.

Workshop #3: It’s in the Mail
This will focus on creating a zine in the form of mail art, documenting the history of the Inman Square post office as well as participants' personal experiences and reflections on the role of physical mail in their lives.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
The grant would allow us to purchase materials, rent space, and create flyers to advertise workshop opportunities to a broad audience. The Papercut Zine Library is an all-volunteer run community resource that operates on an extremely small budget.

Why and to whom is your project important?
As a zine library, we promote print media that presents grassroots, low-cost, and fast ways to disseminate information. These mediums empower people who create them, increase the knowledge and awareness of those who read them, and form connections between the two.We intend to reach out to large range of potential participants, including K–12 students.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
We can complete all three workshops in that time frame.

Proposal: Nomadic Picó Picante

Sara Skolnick

Describe your project.
We propose to create a traveling outdoor public event series called Nomadic Picó Picante, a mobile version of our monthly tropical bass party at Good Life. We will build a traveling sound system that visits neighborhoods for unannounced, guerilla parties throughout Boston. Our sound system will be derivative of a picó—a hand-crafted mobile soundsystem for DJs with origins in Barranquilla, Colombia. Picós are painted with visual elements that evoke local history and culture, and were originally invented to create communal, public parties because people with little money weren’t welcome in dance clubs. We’ll use the platform of a box truck as a mobile stage for DJs and video artists, complete with speakers, lights and projections.

We want to create public spaces that embody the post-geographic nature of tropical bass music, a genre that crossbreeds dance-friendly electronic elements with traditional and folkloric genres such as cumbia, champeta, salsa and kuduro. The nomadic parties will be public, pop-up events that use tropical bass to establish a celebratory inter-cultural dialogue in an oft-segregated Boston.

We’ve built a family of collaborators through Picó Picante by inviting local and out-of-town DJs and video artists. At-large, our aim is to create immersive events that celebrate the intermingling of cultures worldwide. Our team includes: Sara Skolnick and Ernesto Morales (DJs Pajaritos), Ricardo de Lima (OXYcontinental), Vela Phelan (HEXbeam) and Ethan Kiermaier (Ultratumba).

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
The grant will help building costs for the mobile system: specifically, rental of a box truck, materials for the picó DJ stand, and speakers (a pair of QSC K10 speakers are priced at approximately $600 for each in used condition). We’ve secured access at no cost to generators, projectors, an outdoor projector enclosure, lighting, audio/video technicians, DJs and video artists.

Why and to whom is your project important?
The project will benefit participants of these events and the communities they occur in by creating an open cultural space. This action creates a dialogue by using music as a catalyst to explore the commonalities of Boston’s contemporary cultural diversity.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
We expect to have held 1–2 events by mid-summer.

Proposal: Nutrition Education Outreach Project

Robert Sondak

Describe your project.
NEOP is a Massachusetts-based non-profit that teaches low-income and working families how to plan healthy meals incorporating the five major foods groups. In Cambridge we serve a 5,500 person client population. Boston is second with 3,000 households followed by Somerville with 500 households. NEOP operates a two-tier program circulating recipe flyers which highlight nutrition education guides in English, Spanish, and French. We also conduct cooking demonstrations and seminars on appropriate nutrition.

For this project we want to conduct cooking demonstrations and seminars citywide in Cambridge. We will provide in-depth training for women, children and others demonstrating the importance of protein and carbohydrates. These demonstrations and seminars provide training to help people understand the concepts of protein combining and carbohydrate meal planning. Feast Mass funding would help us to jump-start this program, get local Cambridge people involved, and show them how to make improvements in their daily health a reality.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
The Feast Mass grant would allow us to pay for organic produce and fruits, cooking herbs and cooking oils for our presentations.

Why and to whom is your project important?
This grant will allow us to engage the Cambridge community to support our work, familiarize people with the farmers markets and the work of local hunger relief organizations, and introduce the concept of buying locally grown foods to our workshop participants.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
I will establish new partnerships with local food organizations, create a strategic plan to engage community and faith-based organizations, and complete our efforts to find additional funding. By the time of the next Feast Mass, I hope to complete development of a cooking demonstration program with the Harvest Food Pantry located at the Cabridgeport Baptist Church and a culinary program preparing our recipes at Feeding the Hungry community meals program located at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church and continue to look for other community groups to partner with.

Proposal: Raíces con Alas: A Backyard Garden Project

Sara Riegler & Doug Wolcik

Describe your project.
We live in the Jackson Square section of Jamaica Plain, and this year we are turning the empty lot next to our home into a giant garden and small-scale CSA called Raíces con Alas, or Roots with Wings. We want to host 6 monthly gardening workshops, teaching basic backyard gardening, composting and food preservation skills to our neighbors.
Our neighbors are mostly Latino, Spanish-speaking families, many of whom have deep cultural appreciation for food, plants, and community. They are also very interested in gardening; when we are outside working on the garden, folks stop, compliment, and ask questions about how they can make their tomato plants grow this year. Because we have the incredible opportunity to use this garden lot, we want to bring our community together around food, and open up the garden as a communal learning and celebrating space. The workshops will be 1.5 hours long, be held in English and translated to Spanish when/if needed, and a small cooking (and eating!) demonstration will happen at the end, using fresh garden produce.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
The grant would be used to cover three main costs: the cultivation and maintenance of the garden, the cultivation of seedlings, one of which will be given to each attendee of each workshop to practice their skills at home, and to fund a small meal at the end of each workshop. We would also use a bit of it for marketing the workshops.

Why and to whom is your project important?
In JP, there are lengthy waiting lists at all community garden spaces and CSA shares are often too expensive to be accessible. However, many of our neighbors have green spaces outside their homes; our workshops would provide a forum for skill learning and sharing so that they can turn these spaces into small gardens. The workshops would also improve interconnectedness on our block and in our neighborhood.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
We plan to host 6 gardening workshops, beginning in April and ending in September. By the next Feast Mass, we will have held at least 2 workshops and be able to report on their success.

Proposal: Storefront Installation @ Lorem Ipsum

Dominic Casserly & !ND!V!DUALS!

Describe your project.
We propose building an immersive installation in the Lorem Ipsum Storefront in Inman Square. As a Boston-based artist collective we’ve worked to invigorate spaces all over the east coast and want to offer a permanent store front installation in our own community.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
We will use our own studio and tool shop and donate our time to build this work. The funds will go entirely towards the building materials: screws, saw blades, lumber and paint.

Why and to whom is your project important?
Lorem Ipsum is a community-oriented book store in Inman Square that hosts a variety of events, from evening in-store concerts to free classes and workshops and gallery exhibits; they also offer the largest Zine Library in the New England. Lorem Ipsum asked us for help with their storefront display and we would love to donate our installation prowess. As a collective we see the importance and power of collaboration to make amazing artistic endeavors come together. A one-of-a-kind storefront installation would help bring attention to such a positive community center in Inman Square.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
We plan to design, build and install the Lorem Ipsum Project by July of 2012.

Proposal: Taking Back the F-Word Symposium

Adejire Bademosi

Describe your project.

The Taking Back the F-Word Symposium is a feminist symposium designed to provide college women and high school girls an opportunity to meet, collaborate, and engage. The goals are:

1. To bring together a variety of college women and high school girls from the Boston area with passions in different areas. 
2. To collaborate with symposium attendees through workshops and networking opportunities designed to foster partnership. 
3. To engage the greater global community through ticket sales, as 100% of funds gathered from tickets will purchase school uniforms for girls in Nigeria. 
4. To provide dialogue and conversation about improving the number of women in positions of leadership. 

The Symposium will include keynote speeches modeled after TEDTalks and workshops and panels such as Start-up 101, Speaking at the perfect pitch, Self-care, From Pen to paper, How to raise your hand, Finding your passion, Who runs the world? and Feminism in the 21st century.

How will you use the grant to make your idea happen?
The money will go towards providing technical support to the symposium, fund lunches for 100 conference attendees, journals for conference attendees, and placards for presenters.
Why and to whom is your project important?
In the United States only 2.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. Outside of the business arena, 17% of women comprise of Congress. The statistics are clear: women are missing from the leadership table. Instead of simply acknowledging this reality, the Taking Back the F-Word Symposium seeks to create a solution by bringing together girls and women across interests to build networks across the city—a necessity as part of the process of changing those staggering statistics.

If you win, what is the expected status of your project by the time the next Feast Mass rolls around in 3–4 months?
The event will take place on April 28th, 2012. Upon conclusion, we will collect quantitative and qualitative data from conference attendees and prepare a report for the next feast.