The Glowbe, Firefly's Brightest Newsletter 2017.01 - Dates, Art Grants, Volunteering, and More!

Welcome!

Welcome to the inaugural Glowbe, the official newsletter of Firefly Arts Collective, of 2017! It’s still cold out but busy Fireflies have begun coming out of hibernation to plan for this summer’s excitement! There’s a lot of content today — in particular, a whole lot of opportunities to contribute to making the Firefly Community ever more awesome — so please read through... and participate!

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2017 Event Date

In case you hadn’t heard, Firefly 2017 will be Tuesday July 4th through Sunday July 9th, with Monday the 3rd as early arrival. Ticketing will take place in April, with more details to be announced soon!

Call for New Board Members

We are looking for a limited number of participants to add to the Firefly Arts Collective Board of Directors to fill positions vacated in the past year. The Board is responsible for the financial and legal obligations of Firefly Arts Collective Inc. The Board is also responsible for planning the long term development and growth of the organization. Board members are expected to physically attend monthly meetings in the Boston area and contribute several hours of work per week on a year-round basis.

To learn more about the specific responsibilities of Firefly Board Members, please review our Bylaws.

If you have interest in contributing to Firefly at this organizational level, please fill out this form: Application for Board Membership

After you fill out the form we will reply within a week to confirm receipt and may get back to you with some follow-up questions. We may invite you to attend a meeting to chat more about your responses and let you learn more about how we operate. Once we've had a chance to review all responses the Board will discuss and decide if we wish to add additional members.

The Firefly Board of Directors is relatively small to keep discussion and consensus-based decision making practical. Any candidates who we are unable to invite to join the Board will be kept on file to consider as future vacancies arise, and we will also send out this request for expression of interest on a yearly basis.

We're very excited to get new participants involved with the Firefly Board. Beyond the yearly Firefly camping event we are working on expanding the year-round activities of Firefly Arts Collective. Firefly continues to collaborate with Somerville Open Studios and Figment Boston to bring more community art to our cities, and we are exploring other opportunities to engage more deeply with our larger home communities. We look forward to hearing from motivated participants with the time and energy to help expand and organize our community!

Call for New Event Leads

We are approaching planning season for Firefly 2017 and looking for new Event Leads to join our team!

Ideal candidates have led a core or otherwise been involved in organizing burn-related events, and attended Firefly for at least 2 years. Its a fun role with most of the work before the event, and the current leads are happy to answer any questions. Click here for an official description of this volunteer role.

Is this for you? Email the Festival Committee at festival@fireflyartscollective.org to express your interest and learn more. Help make Firefly even better next year!

Call for Art Grant Reviewers

Interested in helping bring art to Firefly? Want to help choose what kind of projects are funded for the event?

This is call out to any of you who might be interested in helping to review the proposals for Firefly's Art Grants this year! We are looking for 10-12 folks who are interested in helping to make this aspect of Firefly successful.

Requirements:

1. You must have attended at least 1 (one) previous Firefly in order to join and participate in this most august of selection committees.

2. You must not be applying for a 2017 Art Grant.

3. You must be available for both of the meeting discussion dates for each block of meetings you attend, taking place in Somerville (a short walk from Davis Square). These discussions can be lively at times, and beverages will be provided:

Crystal and Temple Grant Meeting Block:
- Thursday, February 16th at 7:00 PM
- Thursday, February 23rd at 7:00 PM
Creativity and Legacy Grant Meeting Block:
- Thursday, March 2nd at 7:00 PM
- Thursday, March 9th at 7:00 PM

4. Commit to reading and recording your thoughts on over 40 applications, which may take 4-6 hours of brain time.

The Intense Details:

The job requires a lot of reading and talking as we typically receive over 35 applications for Creativity Grants and a smaller pool of Crystal and Temple Grants. We will have 2 weeks to make our decisions for the two sets of grants, with two meetings per grant. That's a total of 4 meetings altogether. We strongly encourage volunteers to come to both blocks of meetings, but if you can only come to one set that's ok too.

This is a commitment of about 15-20 hours; 6-8 hours of reading and cogitating and four 2-hour meetings where we hash it all out. Once the application deadline has passed, the committee has about a week to read the applications over and fill out a review sheet to decide how well each application met the criteria. We review the applications for Thoughtfulness, Creativity, and Feasibility (explained in detail here and during the meetings).

This is followed by the aforementioned meetings where we compare notes and formulate follow-up questions for all applicants. We wait a week to give time for artists to get their replies back to us, then we meet again and make our final decisions.

If you would like to participate, please sign up via the Art Grants portal by Friday, January 20th: https://grants.fireflyartscollective.org/voters/signup

Any questions? Email us at grants@fireflyartscollective.org!

<3,
Art Grant Core

Request to Review Firefly Gallery

Firefly Arts Collective maintains a public gallery of historical event photography that has been contributed by participants at https://gallery.fireflyartscollective.org/

Most of these photographs pre-date Firefly’s Event Recording Guidelines as well as recent unwelcome reminders that public content on the Internet is public to all, and not just those who you’d like to come across it.

With that in mind, we invite and request the Firefly community to review our past event photography for images of yourself that you would like removed, or other content you think may be of concern to use or the participants pictured.

Please review the Firefly Galleries, relive old exciting memories, and send any comments (with full URL of the page in question) to the gallery administrators at gallery@fireflyartscollective.org

Just the Tip by Wendy WTF

Sequins and glitter
Contribute to litter.
They ain't unicorn poop,
But hideously annoying MOOP*.

*Matter Out of Place

That’s all for this first Glowbe of 2017! Expect more news, and reminders of some of the above, soon!