The Art of Giving: TFN at Vivid Ideas, Sydney

4 June 2015

Vivid Sydney is where art, technology and commerce collide in testimony to human imagination. This illumination festival transforms the CBD into a gigantic nocturnal art installation and draws a crowd like moths to a flame.

On Wednesday 3 June, at the Google Australia office in Pyrmont, another crowd gathered to see the light shine on four creative social change projects pitching at The Funding Network’s (TFN) 18th live collective giving event.

TFN, much like Vivid, gathers a group of organisations and individuals with the talent and capacity to imagine our society in a different way. It reaches across community with a voluntary redistribution of resources that enables everyone to live and give to their full potential.

For this special event, Google Australia, PwC and Creative Partnerships Australia joined forces with TFN as part of the Vivid Ideas program to present this unique brand of social alchemy.

Four innovative grassroots projects were presented:
I-manifest - addressing youth employment by inspiring students to pursue careers in the creative industries;
Treehouse Theatre - enabling newly arrived young refugees to tell their stories through drama therapy;
Dirty Feet - integrated dance workshops for people with disabilities;
Sharing Stories – maintaining and sharing the rapidly disappearing Indigenous songlines using digital technology.

The emotionally charged pitches gave the 200-strong audience a sense of what life must be like for those facing a particular challenge or hardship, and how each of us might be able to make our own contribution to a more equitable society.

And there was plenty of imagination and good humour amongst the pledging audience as they laughed, cried and invented new ways to challenge one another to give over $110k, an incredibly generous result.

See more about the event here