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Inciting Education, One Campaign at a Time

By Jaime R. Wood

The summer of 2012 was my first AERO conference. I’d just met Alan Burnce, the founder of Open Road Learning Community for Teens, a few months before and his idea of building a North Star replica in Portland, Oregon, was just coming to life. I was on his Board of Directors, and we wanted to go to the AERO conference to join with folks from all over the world who were working to innovate education and to be inspired by speakers like Yaacov Hecht and Ken Robinson. Those few days were filled with so much inspiration and positive energy, but a single question arose again and again: We want to build this new learning option in our community, but where will we find the money?

Ideas were flowing from every direction, but this worry about finances left all of us a bit stumped. Just a week or two later, I was talking with a friend and colleague about this, and we came upon the concept of crowdfunding for education. We’d been hearing a lot about Kickstarter and Indiegogo, two of the biggest crowdfunding sites in the world, and we believed that we could build a platform dedicated to the cause we care about most: innovating education. Our theory was, and still is, that if we could help people help themselves, by finding money to start important education initiatives, they could do more good in their communities than we could ever do by ourselves.

One year and five months later, and IncitED: The Crowdfunding Community for Education has hosted sixteen campaigns from around the country, starting with Alan’s campaign to raise money for Open Road. He raised over $9500 in about a month from 109 small donations. This is how crowdfunding works. Alan engaged his community, sharing his passion with them, and in return they gave what they could to help him start Open Road. Since then he has helped eight teens leave negative school experiences and start living their lives “on the Open Road,” as Alan says.

We’ve also supported arts programs, science and technology clubs, nonprofits working to provide options for at-risk youth, and two other North Star related learning centers (Bay State Learning Coop and Perduco). We’ve supported programs that allow learners to build electric cars, practice aerial dance, and play in the marching band at school.

Before that AERO conference, I never would have imagined all this was possible, that a dream could grow so quickly into reality or that I would have the opportunity to help so many people do what they care about.

IncitED’s next step is to gain visibility throughout the U.S. so that all who consider themselves to be teachers and learners know that they have a place that will help them bring their education dreams to life. If you’d like more information about what we do at IncitED or how to get started building your dream, visit IncitED at www.incited.org or contact me at jrwood08@incited.org.