Fundraisers

The following fundraisers took place before we became Activersity e.V. – when we were still a family oriented NGO called Zipfel e.V.. Some of the old members have remained in our project and can show our students how to raise funds for their projects.

Support a Girl

This fundraiser took place in the context of the international women’s day.

Investing in female education is the best thing a country can do. Better educated, safer, healthier and economically powerful adolescent girls contribute to a substantially better future for their families, communities, and our world. All the evidence shows this. So why don’t we focus on it? ⁠Why is female education the first compromise when money is short?

We raised 500 € that we donated to plan.de, a charity that supports all children, but especially girls, to have an equal opportunity in education. It organizes classes for teachers, parents and members of the community to promote that girls have the same right to education as boys.⁠ With our donation, one girl can go to primary school for one year.

⁠💸 they support the girl’s school and job education such that she can generate her own income as an adult⁠
⁠🗞️ they make sure the girls acquire a birth certificate which helps avoid human trafficking⁠
⁠💬 they make sure girls and boys can participate in decision making processes⁠
⁠💕 they provide health education including sex ed, education about sexual assault, HIV and Aids as well as dangers of early pregnancies⁠
⁠📢 they facilitate dialogue between all members of the community to protect against female genital mutilation⁠

The fundraiser was conducted via Pizza Lab, utilizing its outreach through social media. Customers were buying pizza, some of the profits were reserved for the fundraiser. The campaign lasted a week, throughout which information about education for girls was posted every day on social media.

This kind of event is one of the may small events needed as part of a bigger crowdfunding campaign. In the absence of your own restaurant, a fundraiser would seek alliances with bars or restaurants. This is a good example of an alliance – both partners get something they want and that they are working towards anyway: Note that it is very good PR for the store to participate in such a fundraiser, while not all profits need to be donated. The fundraiser attracts not only regular customers but also new customers who are attracted via different channels of the fundraiser, to pursue the goal of supporting the good cause, by doing something they would do anyway. The store remains in good memory of new customers, who might come back in the future.

Activersity e.V. continues paying the yearly rate for this girl ever since.

Sea Eye Rally

This Rally was not organized by our NGO. It was an alliance between Sea-Eye e.V. and our commercial arm, the volunteer-run restaurant and bar Pizza Lab, which helped promote the event, and hosted it, which in turn also raised funds for Pizza Lab’s survival.

Sea Eye’s stated mission is to save people’s lives. Donations are needed to fund the dangerous missions on the sea.

Sea-Eye e. V. is a non-profit- and civil sea rescue organization that was founded in Germany in 2015. “In our rescue operations we search for people in distress at sea along the deadliest exodus route in the world and fight against the daily loss of life in the Mediterranean Sea. Our activity is an answer to the failed migration policies of the European Union, which is denying its responsibility for the thousands of deaths in its immediate proximity.

sea-eye.org

Two bands played in solidarity with Sea Eye, a short film with interviews of the Sea Eye Crew was shown, and all funds raised by Sea Eye were managed by and stayed with Sea Eye.

Tattoos for Ukraine

Although raising funds for war victims was not listed in the official purposes of our NGO (Zipfel e.V. at the time), the German government officially allowed NGOs to help Ukraine at the time.

We managed to convince 10 Tattoo Artists to tattoo in our house, who donated their profits to Ukraine. While the war continued, local volunteers in Lviv were still receiving and re-distributing donations received, mostly from the West of Europe. Still in contact with the Ukrainian volunteers we met during our Trip to Ukraine, we knew that portable water filters were urgently needed.

We aimed at raising 1000 € to buy and ship them to Poland, where our contacts from Ukraine regularly pick up supplies. For Ukrainian volunteers and local NGOs it is very important that the chain of trust is unbroken. Regularly, humanitarian aid gets lost or stolen along the way.

We raised 1210 € in Tattoos alone! Together with the German NGO Leipzig Helps Ukraine e.V., we made sure the donations reached their destination.

Save the Pizza Lab!

In 2019, our volunteer-run “non-profit” vegan Pizzeria Pizza Lab was faced with closure: A cranky neighbor complained about us, whereupon authorities found out that we did not have the required permit to utilize the store as a Pizzeria – the registered use since the 80’s was a butchery. We did not know that this was a requirement – we had been otherwise very careful to abide by all legal requirements such as hygiene standards, registering the project as a pax-paying business (even though it is owned by our NGO and run by volunteers, the German government does not accept a restaurant as “non-profit”, so officially it is a registered business), filing taxes regularly and in time, etc.

The “ministry of order” (Ordnungsamt) required to either close or come up with the documents to acquire the permit: Fire safety plan, renovation permit, approval of fire safety plan by official auditor, approval of renovation plans by the ministry of construction, etc. Estimated costs: over 20.000 €.

We launched a our largest crowdfunding campaign from scratch to rescue Pizza Lab, and succeeded!

For this campaign, we used practically all possible options, and learned the skills almost from scratch, for example:

This fundraiser was conducted largely by supporters in their free time, most of which were not members of our NGO at the time but didn’t want to see this space die due to gentrification.

Some Impressions From the Social Media Campaign