Day Two Hundred Thirty-nine: Evening of March 31st 2010

I’ve been participating in an online competition to help get funds to rebuild an elementary school in southern Illinois. Basically, Pepsi has set up a online listing of participant generated worthy projects seeking monetary support from Pepsi. The winners depend on the number of votes received by visitors to the website who vote for those projects. There are a wide variety of categories and monitory awards ($5,000 to $250,000). I don’t live in the area, but used to spend some of my summers down there when I was but a boy. So when I received an invite in Facebook from a relative to help out, I decided to visit the site and saw that the competition was stiff and their proposal was ranked d 26th. I didn’t bother checking beyond that point and started to vote. I placed a marker on my Facebook page and later in the competition I even made a direct appeal on my page. I don’t know if it had an impact, but it was worth the try. Anyway, the competition ends in a few hours and the proposal has moved from 26th to 10th. It was nice to see the public response to all of the projects, but only the top two projects will receive the funding and that means the little school won’t be getting the award.

What bothers me about the situation isn’t the obvious issues with a competition like this (big market little market and its relationship to the nature of the project and there were a lot of quality projects). No what bothers me is the State of Illinois involvement in the rebuilding of the school. I didn’t see any mention of the State support for rebuilding the school. I mean the school served seven to eight hundred students and the community has to resort to this online popularity competition. Somehow that doesn’t sound like the way it is supposed to be, but Illinois politics is a very interesting animal.

If you‘re interested, here is a Facebook page with information (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=107567595931442&index=1) and the Ben-Gil Boosters webpage (http://www.bengilboosters.com/ )

For as long as it‘s needed, I’ll keep closing this way, please check out a good organization that’s providing aid in Haiti and make what ever kind of contribution that you is can afford.