Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

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> I think it'd be great to encourage kids to visit the parks through passes like these. Sponsor a lottery/giveaway or a contest featuring children's park-themed art or creative writing as chances to win lifetime park passes for them and their family.

It’s a great idea, and if you’re one of the people here making SV tech salaries, you could make that happen tomorrow. You’re talking about $5000-10000 of direct philanthropy to run/promote the contest and buy those passes for the winner. Media coverage would come easy and you could get it to snowball through other contributors after driving it through the first time.

(Not being flippant. Sometimes people just need help seeing what they can actually make happen without too much trouble.)

Money is cheap, it's time that's expensive... I don't have any experience here, but my intuition is that organizing and executing the event with appropriate bureaucratic signoff, managing PR, reviewing all the candidates (in a fair and unbiased manner), etc... sounds like weeks of effort spanning months, no?

Think more hackathon project than startup.

Philanthropically, people do this scale of stuff for their own communities all the time. In the arts, people stand up and run themed contests every day.

There is absolutely time to be invested in designing or approving whatever online presence, reviewing submissions, becoming comfortable with whatever legal requirements, etc — but that’s the part that makes it a memorable life experience, not unlike the time spent on that trip to Belize or in those woodshop classes.

How interested are you? If you or someone you know can provide the money, I bet I can find someone in the parks service, or a close connection, to handle the bureaucratic side of it. (I was an environmental science undergrad, and we frequently worked with the NPS and similar entities. Culturally it's very different from the tech world; they are often budget-starved for things but can make time for events and such.)

I have done small philantrophic projects with 5-6 people and doing it with a team helped a lot

I imagine you could send the money and idea to Amplifier[0] and have them run that for you

[0] https://amplifier.org/

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