Grow JUMP! Together

Hello world . . .

This has been a huge day for me. First, and most important – my dear little sister gave birth to a beautiful baby boy (William Milton). You can bet there will be pictures soon. 🙂 Check my flickr page for updates soon….

On this auspicious day, the stars also aligned to let us launch our Kickstarter campaign to build JUMP!

Let me break this down a little bit – JUMP! is the monthly party that I started in the spring of this year with Adam Gibbons. Adam is a DJ, producer, artist, visionary – and I am blessed to say – now is a dear friend. He and I had this crazy idea that we could combine his successful Uhuru Afrika monthly parties (which feature deep soulful afro-centric house music) with my passion for live music and together we could create some amazing dance parties. Well, over the past year, we’ve taken this idea from dream to reality – throwing 5 amazing parties at a fantastic space in Harvard Square called Oberon. This is where Kickstarter comes in.

Kickstarter is a new way to fund creative ideas and ambitious endeavors. Basically it allows creators to reach out to fans, friends, family, and the whole wide world and gather a tremendous source of money and encouragement to further creative goals.

We are seeking to raise $3,000 through our current campaign (which ends December 17, 2010). You can read a little more about why we need to finance this party on our Kickstarter page. Additionally, I’ll tell you that we’ve been building this party off personal investments from Adam and myself. We need to expand our efforts a bit – do more and better promotion and press outreach, provide higher guarantees to bands (for a couple reasons I’ll dive into below), ensure we can cover other expenses for bands (hotels, backline (drums, amps, etc), food), and then start to do the other things we’re dreaming of to fully transform Oberon into our vision of a modern urban african club.

We think that with $3,000 we can do all these things, and get the party to a sustainable level pretty quickly. We’ve been pulling in between 150-200 people to each party thus far, and think that once we’re up in the 200-300 range coming through the door on a nightly basis, we’ll be in a really good and sustainable place.

If you can assist in any way in this effort, I will be humbly grateful. You can assist by spreading the word and pointing folks to our Kickstarter campaign (links below). You can assist by coming out to our next party (Thursday, December 16th featuring Kaleta & Zozo Afrobeat). You can assist by contributing to the campaign, in any amount. Really. $1 is appreciated. $100 is appreciated. And $1,000 is appreciated.

Whatever you feel like contributing to our efforts to build the party. Besides some pretty awesome rewards, we promise to continue throwing the best dance parties you’ve ever been to in Boston (or anywhere else!).

If you have questions about this campaign, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to address them.

Now, enough reading – please help us spread the word and fund this party!

Links below.

With humility, love, respect, and thankfulness.

-erich

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