Yesterday I read where a Durham company was marketing the ELF, a closed body solar powered bicycle hybrid for commuters that had been funded on Kickstarter-- a crowdsourcing site that provides funding to inventors, artists and others to get new ideas off the ground and to market. You don't hear of things like this coming out of Greensboro much so it started me wondering.
To date, there have been 54 successful Kickstarter campaigns that originated in Greensboro-- 52 music and video projects, the Children's Museum mural and a comic book project.
Now don't get me wrong, these things are great. I've seen some of them and know some of their creators. And being a poet, novelist and children's author I do appreciate the arts but let's be real, as creative and wonderful as all these things are, none of them have the long range economic potential of Durham's ELF. Not even in your wildest dreams.
So I got to looking around Kickstarter and thinking perhaps it's a bit of an odds kind of thing, that being the odds are greater that projects like ELF will be found if there are more projects overall. First stop, Durham where there are 108 projects-- exactly twice as many as Greensboro. And what did I find? Lots more projects that while all creative, would not usually be considered art and would all be of a greater economic impact than the kinds of projects being Kickstarted in Greensboro. Why in Durham they've even successfully kickstarted food trucks while at the same time Greensboro was attempting to run them off.
And Durham still has more successful arts, music and video projects than Greensboro.
In Charlotte they've successfully kickstarted factories, commercial bakeries and organic, free range chicken farms. In Greensboro I was part of the fight a few years back to get the Greensboro City Council to allow myself and others to keep the chickens we already had and remain one of the few owners of grandfathered roosters. And in Asheville, when someone wanted to produce a TV show, instead of going to city council they got the money on Kickstarter instead. And yes, more art, music and video than Greensboro.
In Wilmington they're Kickstarting playgrounds and making coffee cups. In Raleigh they Kickstarted the Crank Arm Brewing Co, a brewery that delivers beer to downtown Raleigh via rickshaw, farms in the city and rocket engines that don't pollute. And again, more art, music and video than Greensboro.
There seems to be a trend here: Cities with more manufacturing and more commerce can afford more art, music and video than Greensboro. Horse in front of the cart, remember?
In Winston-Salem they Kickstarted the Fargo, a device that allows you to control almost anything via the Internet. And a brewery. Chapel Hill kickstarted a brewery as well.
Kickstarters in Boone started a food truck that sells fast, fresh, local, and healthy food options. And of all places, the tiny little town of Southern Pines successfully funded a project to launch, track, film and recover a geocache sent into space! All in all, successfully funded projects numbered as follows.
Charlotte 114
Asheville 112
Raleigh 112
Durham 108
Wilmington 57
Greensboro 54
Chapel Hill 51
Winston-Salem 42
Carrboro 16
Southern Pines 7
So in closing I ask, is Greensboro simply not an inspiring place to live... Or have Greensboro's long established leaders simply driven away the best and the brightest to cities that are more accepting of new ideas and better ways of getting the job done?
Why is this happening? It's happening because our leaders still confuse economic indicators (development) with economic drivers, thinking them one in the same and thereby creating the sort of environment, where the very creative class they talk about wanting to attract most, wish to avoid. And in the long run, what is this going to cost us?
Anyway, it's Saturday and I'm off to Burlington to get our project a few steps closer to debut on Kickstarter. Too bad Greensboro missed that one too.
