Creatively serving up access to capital

If you’re born smart, you’ll probably find a way to educate yourself whether you have access to classes or not – but a scholarship sure does help.  Same thing with creativity:  A person with the deep desire to concoct something will try to bring that thing about with or without personal wealth.

It’s just that money makes the whole process so much easier. And so much more likely to succeed.  And there’s so frighteningly little of it right now – especially for artists, inventors and entrepreneurs, most of whom have a wretchedly hard time persuading people to back them even in a prosperous economy. 

So it’s all the more satisfying to find that human imagination has started finding ways around the brick walls and barbed wire that so often separate creative people from the funding they need. As Will Limkemann explained  not long ago in his Geniocity.com blog, peer-to-peer lending now offers entrepreneurs an easier, online path to low-cost business loans than through a gantlet of interviews and paper chases with bank  or federal-agency officers.  That took inspiration. So did Kickstarter, an online service that invites people  to raise money for their creative projects in sort of the same way that American Idol performers win their competitions - by public vote. Except that Kickstarter allows many people to succeed.

Now there’s something new arising across America that not only provides creative people with a simpler and shorter path to money, but also pulls down the barriers between art, food and entrepreneurship  in a way that  gives us at Geniocity.com little frissons of joy. It’s called A Moveable FEAST and it should appeal to a lot of communities, including my home city of Cleveland, where local hero-slash-nationally-acclaimed-Iron-Chef Michael Symon was recently awarded a Cleveland Arts Prize and another artful chef, Ben Bebenroth, won a 2009 COSE  Ten Under 10 small-business award for his organic/local food enterprise, Spice of Life Catering Co.

Local chapters of the FEAST – Minneapolis’ is one of the latest –  present big vegetarian dinners carried out with the help of a local farm. Several hundred people are invited to attend a dinner for a reasonable price – $10 or $20 -  and view a number of art projects displayed around the room. The artist whose project gets the most votes gets the collected dinner money and the chance to come back the next time to update everyone on his or her current work.

Cool, no? I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty tired of  having so much of the world’s usable capital locked up inside so many armed and moated fortresses and spending all my time trying to figure out the secret handshake  to the money club. Like sisters, maybe creative people can do it for themselves by helping each other succeed.