Our Top4 really proved to us tonight why they were the Top4 - their pitches were truly awesome!
The evening started with Elke Goebel talking to us about her idea - West LRT Walkabout - to help us feel like we are part of the West LRT. egardless of how we feel about it - we should embrace it as part of our city's awesome infrastructure & urban architecture. Elke's idea is to organize a community walk across the massive, bridge-like structure before the tracks are laid. This would give people a view of the city scape at their leisure from atop this massive structure.
Next up was Stephanie Norn from Calgary Circus Studio (pitch hitting for Cary Lam, director of the school) pitching for the $1000 grant to invest in a portable apparatus that would allow them to take their school outside and to enable the school to put on demos, shows and workshops almost anywhere. They would also be able to rent out (or loan) the equipment - and their team - out to non-profit organizations in the city to help in fund-raising events. All I can say is "who knew there was a cool circus school in Calgary?!"
Our 3rd presenter was Neshali Weera of People's Poetry Festival. Neshali and her trusty team of non-Microsoft PowerPointers got the crowd thoroughly engaged in the possibility of back-alley, interactive poetry in Kensington in August. Bonus points for fitting Haiku into a 90 second pitch!
Our final pitch of the evening came from the eternally bubbly Nicky Dundas. Nicky has been distributing random acts of kindness in the city since she moved here - everything from plugging parking meters anonymously, to handing out a coffee card to a stranger, to leaving packets of seeds for people to find with a note asking them to just plant them and see what happens. Nicky calls these acts "Happy Sprinkles - Just a girl in Calgary looking to sprinkle happiness around town!" Nicky left everyone in the room feeling like they'd just had a big, warm hug. :)
The team went off to choose the winner and I have to say that this was, by far, the toughest deliberation we've had. Any one of these ideas could have been the winner on any award night. We had to resort to our hand-dandy, awesome voting machine to determine the winner ...
And the winner is -Stephanie and Calgary Circus Studio!
Congratulations to all the entrants and to our Top4 finalists - together we are making Calgary just a little bit more awesome every day!
Don't forget - next submission deadline is July 10th. Get your awesome idea in for a 90 second chance to win $1000!
Added bonus next month - we've invited Stephanie and the amazing students at Calgary Circus to come and give us a demo at the July 28th Thousand Dollar Thursday. Now THAT's awesome!
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