Crowdfunding: A new mix of innovation, public support, entrepreneurism, politics & energy

Gary Topp, Development Director for Bristol Green Capital Partnership CIC, writes in this guest blog about the Better Bristol campaign and this approach to fundraising…

Roll for the Soul: community-focused bike cafe in Bristol

The more that we thought about these issues the more important it was to look at a city scale crowdfunding platform to support the sector. Over the last few months we have been working with Crowdfunder UK – the fastest growing crowdfunding platform in the world- to develop and launch the “Better Bristol’ campaign.

The Better Bristol campaign is now online and you can register your interest by filling in the online form.

Want to know more about the campaign and how you can benefit from it? Read our news post on the Better Bristol Campaign.

“Bristol is a city of projects, ideas and activities. They just keep happening as motivated people and engaging organisations generate new thoughts and new connections. It’s part of the city’s DNA.

Over the past year the Partnership has been working with, and talking to, partners about how it can best support the continual stream of good ideas generated in the city in this new and more difficult environment. As you will know this is as much a challenge for the Partnership itself, as it is for many projects it seeks to support and collaborate with.Any project and idea needs resources and a set of ‘capacities’ to succeed – people, space, materials, permissions, etc. And whilst many things are often achieved on the basis of energy, commitment and determination … sometimes ‘cash’ is required. As we know in recent years, cash has been harder to find as the old models of investment, public sector support and grants from trusts and foundations has become more challenging. Sometimes we call this ‘austerity’.

In the new funding landscape the biggest new ‘player’ in these changed circumstances has been the global uptake of crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a new mix of innovation, politics, public support, entrepreneurism and energy. It is open to all for success or otherwise. We all know the global stories.

The Partnership is about city scale interventions and it is about the increasing importance of cities as the appropriate ‘unit’ to address the climate challenge. At city scale projects and ideas can have real impact. They can be both locally empowering and part of a global movement of positive action and change. Right now cities matter more than ever before.

This exciting relationship brings together the world’s biggest city scale Partnership, the expertise of Crowdfunder and an ambition to generate and support £1million of grassroots projects. This is a different kind of approach to funding – we all have to support the work that we care about. This can happen at individual giving level (a few pounds ….) or it can be a great way for business and grant-funders to match their resources directly with those projects that the ‘crowd’ endorse. It’s a perfect match. Let’s help Bristol become even better.”
--------------------------------
This blog has been reposted with kind permission from the Bristol Green Capital Partnership. View the original blog post.

Converting probabilities between time-intervals

This is the first in an irregular sequence of snippets about some of the slightly more technical aspects of uncertainty and risk assessment. If you have a slightly more technical question, then please email me and I will try to answer it with a snippet. Suppose that an event has a probability of 0.015 (or 1.5%) of happening at least once in the next five years. Then the probability of the event happening at least once in the next year is 0.015 / 5 = 0.003 (or 0.3%), and the probability of it happening at least once in the next 20 years is 0.015 * 4 = 0.06 (or 6%). Here is the rule for scaling probabilities to different time intervals: if both probabilities (the original one and the new one) are no larger than 0.1 (or 10%), then simply multiply the original probability by the ratio of the new time-interval to the original time-interval, to find the new probability. This rule is an approximation which breaks down if either of the probabilities is greater than 0.1. For exa...

1-in-200 year events

You often read or hear references to the ‘1-in-200 year event’, or ‘200-year event’, or ‘event with a return period of 200 years’. Other popular horizons are 1-in-30 years and 1-in-10,000 years. This term applies to hazards which can occur over a range of magnitudes, like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, space weather, and various hydro-meteorological hazards like floods, storms, hot or cold spells, and droughts. ‘1-in-200 years’ refers to a particular magnitude. In floods this might be represented as a contour on a map, showing an area that is inundated. If this contour is labelled as ‘1-in-200 years’ this means that the current rate of floods at least as large as this is 1/200 /yr, or 0.005 /yr. So if your house is inside the contour, there is currently a 0.005 (0.5%) chance of being flooded in the next year, and a 0.025 (2.5%) chance of being flooded in the next five years. The general definition is this: ‘1-in-200 year magnitude is x’ = ‘the current rate for eve...

A dirty relationship

I went to see Cabot Institute Artist in Residence Neville Gabie ’s Archiving Oil installation in the Basement Stores of Geology last night (16 May 2013). It’s pretty cool to be down in the depths of the Wills Memorial Building at the University of Bristol and I can safely assure you I saw no ghosts. I started off by going into a lift and as the doors opened into the basement, there was an eerie darkness with a bright light emanating from a creepy corner. A man dressed in white was in front of me and he was pouring a sticky black substance into buckets. A distinctly thick, gloopy and dirty sound filled my ears. I promise you it wasn’t a ghost but the image in front of me was quite harrowing. We use oil in everything we do and here was oil in its bare nakedness – black, shiny, thick, dirty. I stopped and stared for a while, mesmerised by the horribleness of the clean white background being splatted with this dirty substance. ...

Cabot Institute for the Environment blog

Search This Blog