Supporting astronomy education & outreach one project at a time!

Almost on a daily basis Galileo Teacher Training Program receives requests for support. Many are for small projects, but that can make a huge difference for local communities struggling for funding.

“Our astronomy school club makes regular observations for free to our community reaching on average 50 people per observations session opened to all community we would like to invite a scientist to talk during our events but we struggle with funding for transportation and accommodation. And it’s not much, roughly reaching 300€. ”

“Our astronomy club would like to organise an astrophotography exhibition, we have managed to find a place for exhibition but we struggle to find the funding for printing the photos, this would reach 200 people in our community and we would need 350€ for the printings.”

“Our portable planetarium would like to offer planetarium shows for local impoverished community but we have maintenance costs and travel expenses, roughly reaching 400€ we could reach 100 people in our most needed communities.”

“Our school would like to organise a tactile exhibition for our district’s visually impaired communities but we struggle for tactile printings. We could reach around 100 people due to the inclusive nature of the event, visually impaired and their families could enjoy at the same time from this astronomy exhibit, but our school can’t manage to support the 400€ for implementing it.”

… and the list of examples could go on.

Unfortunately, due to the volume of the projects, we can do so much but to provide assistance pointing towards free educational activities and programs that these communities can implement. It is with a heavy heart that we watch many of these projects fail due to a lack of small amounts of funding. We continuously try to do our best to help these local communities find a solution, but we too, struggle. With all of this in mind, we would like to announce a new program: Global For Local – supporting astronomy education & outreach one project at a time.  With this program, Galileo Teacher Training Program will provide you help to raise money for small, local astronomy projects needing up to 500 US Dollars via a crowdfunding campaign.

To participate, send us the project information by filling the following form: http://goo.gl/forms/SMgloF3PlK

We will then analyze the proposals and determine the priority list according to relevance and impact. The next step is then to help you set up the crowdfunding campaign on Fiat Physica website and assist you in publicizing it for the duration of the campaign (one month). Once the campaign finishes, GTTP will send you the money via wire transfer. We will transfer the amount of funding received to the project leader (the crowdfunding platform retains 5% and an additional 3% is for credit card processing) It is then your responsibility to use the funds to complete your project and reward the donors according to your project details.

If you have any additional questions, please send an email to info@galileoteachers.org.

Deadline for 1st call: 25 October 2015