Team:Unesp Brazil/Fundraising
iGEM Unesp Brazil
Fundraising
Overview
Considering the economic crisis that Brazil is facing and the budget cuts in investments in science and technology, every move towards captivating more public engagement and collaboration became even more relevant to achieve our goal: participate in the Giant Jamboree in 2018. Therefore, as difficult as it is to raise money in our country, we used creativity and mobilized all members from the team to do our best, and take advantage from all opportunities that would come in the short period of time we had and in this scenario of shortage investments.
To begin, we started a crowdfunding in order to receive financial support from those who identify with our purpose, project and mission, besides been interested in giving a boost in Brazilian research, inviting them to donate any value, and in return we would give rewards.
June Fest
In June we were invited to participate at June Fest from Assentamento Bela Vista do Chibarro, Araraquara, and there we sold vegan sweets and drinks. June Fest is a Brazilian traditional event, known for its bonfire, typical food, music, and other peculiarities. After, we also did our project “Women in Science” at Assentamento.
Workshops
In the second semester of this year, we gathered some abilities and acknowledgment from our team members to create paid mini-courses, hosted in our university. Inspired by the fact we used a 3D printer to print the pieces of our bioreactor, we saw the opportunity to show how this machine works, as a theme for the first mini-course.
Furthermore, we offered two more themes related to design: “Basic of Photoshop/Illustrator”, softwares used to create and manipulate images, that we also used in our marketing and design, and the other theme was “How to design a creative presentation”, important for graduation and non graduate students, to do import presentation in the university such as for applying to a job, for example.
In these workshops graduate students from School of Pharmaceutical Science, Social Science, Dentistry, Chemistry Institute- Araraquara, students from other universities and professionals participated as well.
In the end, we raised a great amount of money to fund our trip, and it is well-timed to remember we are very grateful for all who donated in our crowdfunding, bought our sweets and drink at June Fest and participated in the workshops, as well every single one that helped us to spread our project!
