2016 Letter of Intent

[J Howard Boyd]

The window for submitting a Letter of Intent for Burning Man 2016 honoraria is now open. Big question for the admin team of Seaweed is this: Do we want to try for an honorarium grant this year.

A bit of history and context:
The only time we have ever received grant money from BM was our first year, as part of the Regional CORE project. Since then we have submitted for grants every year (year 2 as CORE again, and subsequent years under the Honorarium program). We did not receive any grants from BM in any of those years.

Each of those years we successfully raised enough money to bring our art, anyway, with the exception of this year. As reported at the last board meeting, we are running about 2,000 shy of covering this year's budget.

In the years we did not receive any grants from BM, we did receive a significant amount of support from BM in terms of Early Arrival passes, Gift and Reduced Price Tickets, early access to ticket purchases and a slew of minor support services on-site. While BM Arts has scaled back the level of services offered to non-honoraria art, I think we can safely rely on receiving many of the services we've become accustomed to even if we do not submit for an Honorarium.

If we do decide to apply for an Honorarium, we need to submit our Letter of Intent by November 30th, 5:00pm PST. The letter of intent does not have to be a complete grant application, but it does require quite a bit of thought and composition. More information about the process can be found here: http://burningman.org/culture/burning-man-arts/grants/brc-honoraria/

I am of the mind to not bother with this process this year, but welcome other opinions.

-Howard