Tips & Advice

I'm not sure what the best route would be to try to ask for financial help, ie donations. A neighbor of mine posted on Facebook and received materials for a construction project he's doing. I have no understanding of how he was able to get people to give him money to work on his property, especially since everybody out here is trying to work on their property. I just don't have a clue why anybody would give money to someone else. Maybe someone who's done this already and has some experience with fundraising can enlighten me?

The 2 most popular platforms for donation-gathering are gofundme and give set go.  I haven't seen facebook or other social media yield large donations, unless its a link to one of those platforms and someone is simply sharing it on facebook.  I'm often surprised at how people are able to get others to donate to them as well.  I do it occasionally with my tythe money, a portion of my money that I set aside for either church or for helping others who are in a fix.  But other than that I can't afford to donate to things.

I am not sure either. It seemed when I was doing Permaculture full time I had so much to spend money on that there was no way I could afford to donate money to other farms. At least when I had so much to do on my farm. I did get some help from the USDA-NRCS but there were many rules for those grants.

I suspect the neighbor that said people were paying him to do his projects probably inflated the true amount that was given to him, or made it seem as if it was much more than it was. You generally find that out in life, those that look or claim to have money really don't. Kind of like how the MTV Show Cribs was called out this week and proven the whole show was fake. Really a whole show trying to drive a generation into thinking materialistically. I wonder how many lives were lost as people watched that show, grew enamored in that lifestyle that never was, and did sinister things in the name of jealousy, corruption and outright theft?

In any case, stay the course. Nothing given to you has such a value as what you have had to earn and pay for yourself.

I agree with Steve.  

I have lots of time and little money.

I like to use my time to spread permaculture to the world.

I guess my question is - was he getting money or goods? Often people have a bit of surplus material from projects and are happy to get rid if someone will put it to use, and prefereably collect! This goes for anything from kitchen equipment to bricks. If you don't ask, you don't get.
Money is slightly different, as you cannot be so sure that the money will be well spent, so a bit more trust in a good cause might be required. Facebook or other social media is one source, we have a flea market forum here as well as crowdfunding place to link to kickstarter or other online money raising sites.

If you could spread the word somehow that you need certain materials and ask that stuff be donated rather than taken to the tip? Our local tip is quite small- services a town of only a couple of thousand people- and a lot of people were using it as a source of supplies. I personally brought home loads of fencing material, machinery, old tools, timber, fire wood, roofing iron, tons of pipe and other scrap steel- it was my only sourse of wrought iron for repurposing in the forge. All above board- I'd gather what I wanted, take it to the man at the office and show him, he'd do some figuring in his head and say something like twenty bucks sound OK? Yep. And now, after encouraging us all to be good citizens and recycle and reuse, they've banned the taking of any materials from the tip- it gets crushed and shipped off to China. Try advertising locally- what's the worst that could happen?