Help the Stork Bus Challenge!
Reader Rae Stabosz writes:
Dear Catholic Blogosphere,
“For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light,“ Luke 16:8. My name is Rae Stabosz. Some of you know me. Most of you don’t. I would like to interrupt your kitten videos, your reddit snark and your all-purpose interwebs fun and bring you a bold display of naked desperation.
Would you like to participate in a pious stunt? One that is guaranteed to CHAP PLANNED PARENTHOOD’S HIDE?!? You don’t have to be Catholic. You just have to hold to this equal care principle: in an unwanted pregnancy, both the pregnant woman AND her unborn child deserve equal respect and care.
Here’s the stunt: Between now and the first day of Advent – Sunday, November 30 – we internet White Hats will pool our resources and fund a SINGLE mobile pregnancy center equipped with ultrasound!
• It will be beautifully appointed and staffed by professionals; it will park outside of abortion clinics in Delaware and offer FREE ULTRASOUND, FREE PREGNANCY TESTING and FREE COUNSELING to women in crisis.
• It will also park at fairs, church festivals, and other happy community events, educating the public to the marvels of ultrasound technology and what it shows of intrauterine development.
• All we want to build the bus and put it on the road is $120,000 in capital expenses. We will get the operating expenses on our own! (there’s a reason for that).
You may have heard of Save the Storks, the national organization founded by Joe Baker in 2011. Save the Storks is taking the country by storm. Its mission is “to equip pregnancy centers to more effectively connect with abortion-vulnerable women … by providing Stork Buses — mobile medical units — so that pregnancy centers can offer free sonograms and pregnancy tests wherever women need them.”
Two months ago, an eclectic group representing two of the three counties of Delaware founded the Delaware Stork Bus, Inc. Our intention is to carry out the Save the Storks vision in Delaware. We have signed a contract with Joe and Co. We are ready to rumble. And we want your help. We have put together a crowd sourcing campaign on GoFundMe with a goal of $120,000.
BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT BUT… I can hear you say.
• “Why should I help you? Aren’t there other groups in the country trying to get a Stork Bus off the ground?”
• “I live in Kokomo, Indiana, home of the Kokomo Mantis. Why should I care about little Delaware?”
Fair enough. Here’s where “stunt” part comes in. I DO live in Delaware, and I DO want to pull out all the stops to get this Stork Bus up and running. I freely admit that it is self-serving. But if the stunt takes off we could scare the pants off of Planned Parenthood and fund more than just one little Delaware bus! “For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light, “ Jesus tells us in the gospel of Luke. And isn’t it the truth?
No Stork Bus project has used crowd funding to our knowledge, and we hope to establish a precedent. The secular world has been a lot quicker to harness the power of crowd sourcing than we have been. Witness the success of the ALS Bucket challenge. In two weeks’ time it made four million dollars for the ALS Association and its 38 chapters. It did this by harnessing the power of social media and the fun of seeing people (especially celebrities) have buckets of ice dumped on one another.
Yet the ALS Association supports using human embryos for stem cell research, and so Catholics and others were not able to embrace this as readily as some.
$120,000 is just 4800 donors giving $25 each. What if the White Hat blogosphere gives more??
Here is the deal, and it’s a good one:
If we raise more than $120,000 between now and the end of November, we will give 100% of all additional monies collected to the national Save the Storks project!
That’s right! We are not greedy. This is our first fundraiser, and we are targeting our capital expenses only. We will trust in our fundraising acumen to raise the first three year’s operating expenses on our own. We came up with this stunt not just for Delaware Stork Bus, but for all of us. We want to show the abortion industry that we can get a fully-outfitted Stork Bus on the road in a little more than two-months time. That will have them shaking in their stylish yet affordable boots!
But we don’t want this to be a Zero Sum Game. If YOU give to US, we don’t want you to worry that other Stork Buses will suffer. Save the Storks gives grant money as part of its mission. So if our little stunt goes anywhere, and we collect any extra we make above our capital goal of $120,000, we will give the rest to Joe and his good people to give in grants as they see fit.
Most of you don’t know me from Eve, even though I’ve been a Catholic internet presence since before there was an Internet! (bit.listserv.catholic, anyone? PLATO Religion notesfile circa 1982?) But I am not Father Frank. I’m not Jill. I’m not Troy or Abby or Mark or Joe or any of the people you know and trust. I can vouch for myself, and I’ve left a 20+ years trail on the Internet. Look me up and see if I seem trustworthy.
Look up all of us! You’ll find some surprises! Yes, you will find that we have paid our dues. We are trustworthy. Children of light: allons-y! No need to be less sensible than the children of the world!
Rae Stabosz, with the Delaware Stork Bus Board of Directors: Evelyn Baldwin Susan Bullock Nicole Collins Jayne Mitchell-Werbrich Ed Taubert Tim Werbrich
