The 2016 Worldbuilders Fundraiser is Live!

The Worldbuilders 2016 Fundraiser is officially underway!

Welcome! Have a seat! Grab some tea! If you’ve joined us before, you know the drill. Feel free to head over to our Worldbuilders Team Pageand help the total climb! If you’re joining us for the first time, we’re glad you’re here! For the next four weeks, we’ll be posting updates, stretch goals, auctions, and lottery prizes, all to raise money for our favorite charity, Heifer International.

Why Heifer?

Here’s the low-down: We like Heifer International because they are incredibly smart about how they organize their programs. They only go where they’re invited, and they work with community leaders and families to make sure that what they do is what the community needs. Once the community establishes their goals for improvement–anything from improving farming techniques, to establishing a source for clean water, to starting a co-operative where the entire community can have access to supplies they normally wouldn’t be able to afford separately–Heifer starts the education process to get everyone on the same page. After a year or so of classes in business, farming, veterinary skills, and so on, Heifer brings in the materials the program requires. This can be livestock, seeds or saplings, bees and hive materials, or any other supplies to get the program off the ground.

The best part of Heifer’s programs is that every one of them features their idea of Passing the Gift–once a family is successful in the program, they pass on their education and materials to the next family. If a community’s co-operative thrives, its members help the next town over establish one of their own. When livestock give birth, the offspring is passed on to another family, along with all the original family’s knowledge. It’s a ripple effect of goodwill that makes sure the money raised keeps working for years, touching more and more lives.

How can we help?

Worldbuilders raises money for Heifer and their programs by making it a big ol’ geek-centered party. Our favorite authors donate rare and signed books. Artists and jewelers send their finest creations. Some of the biggest publishers in the industry send in books (and often entire sets of books!) and introduce us to even more folks who are glad to help out. All the donations we receive, from books and games to jewelry and collectibles are added to our Lottery and auctioned off to raise money.

Speaking of raising money, this year we’ve teamed up with Heifer to pull together ONE MILLION DOLLARS of matching money. Every dollar we raise will be matched. If you donate $120 to buy a family a goat, Heifer will receive $240 for two goats. If we can raise a million dollars, Heifer International will receive two million dollars to help pull families here and around the world out of poverty.

Wait….lottery?

At the end of the fundraiser, we will draw names and match them up with the thousands of prizes in our Lottery. Every time you donate $10, your name goes in once. Donate $50, you’re entered five times. After our random draw, we mail out everything in the Lottery Library as a massive wave of Thank You to our supporters!

So what all is going on?

Over the next four weeks, keep coming back to worldbuilders.org for daily updates. We’ll be adding more stuff to the Lottery Library. We have auctions launching every Sunday at 7pm CST. Our friends and supporters are joining us for Stretch Goals when we hit certain dollar amounts. Neil Gaiman will be reading us a story if we hit a million dollars, and everyone who donates through our Worldbuilders Team Page can vote on which one! Plus, we’ll have a couple more surprises lined up to keep things interesting. Visit us often, share the stretch goals on Facebook and Twitter, and help us get the word out.

Let’s change some lives!