Our new charity album, Building Bridges, has premiered and our new Seeds of Kindness fundraiser for the 2015 Christmas season and most of the year 2016 was launched with a bang: within just a few days, you have contributed over $3,000, including matching funds! Thanks to your efforts, the Against Malaria Foundation will save a person’s life with this contribution!

When you donate, you can download the latest album, Building Bridges, as well as all our eight previous albums. Now is a great time to donate because the Against Malaria Foundation needs to fund several new campaigns against the disease in 2016!

Below are a few questions about our program that many have asked about. If you have other questions that are not answered here feel free to ask them in the comments on our website.

Why the Against Malaria Foundation?

That is an excellent question, because where you donate is usually much more important than what you donate. Analyses of the impact of charities – for example those graphed below – have found that with the same donation some charities can produce 100, sometimes 1000 times as much value for the world. Few people wonder whether they’ll donate ...

Last year’s Czequestria was a life-changing experience for me. This year’s Czequestria will become a life-changing experience for hundreds of people who will be spared an infection with malaria.

This time the table was run mostly by Sara and me, but during the time that Ashley took over, supported by catra, they raised significant koruny too.

Again Stable-Tec Studios will contribute their complete profits to our invaluable cause. Thank you!

The total of almost €4,000 is enough to save about two lives in expectation and avert easily 300 times as many nonfatal cases of malaria that would’ve meant treatment costs and lost income for many of the poorest of the poor.

Donations

Czequestria and Your Siblings are transferring the donations we raised to the Against Malaria Foundation in several batches. Since all transfer that involve currency conversions to euro are complete, the counts below can now be viewed as authoritative.

Assuming that Czequestria had in the area of 260 attendees, this puts the contribution per attendee in the €15 area, roughly the same as at GalaCon. You rock!

GalaCon 2015 has been an unprecedented success for us, a success that we’ve transferred to the Against Malaria Foundation right away.

“Us” is Bronies for Good, Your Siblings, and the two of us, Nino and Denis, who have run the charity booth. But none of this would’ve been possible without our monetary and in-kind donors, and the tireless work of the staff and volunteers of GalaCon as well as former staff, whose ideas and initiative continues to boost our fundraising. Many thanks also to Stable-Tec Studios for donating their complete profits to the cause.

Considering only the effects on mortality and only the effects on children under five (who are most likely to die from malaria) and not considering costs that the Against Malaria Foundation leverages from other funders, the €20,027 we raised will buy at least 5,500 mosquito nets and will save the lives of over 10 people. (Based on research by GiveWell.)

We sold out of Bound Together at GalaCon, but we’ll have more at Czequestria!

Statistics

Donations

Charity Album: Seeds of Kindness: Building Bridges

Bronies for Good is pleased to announce its fifth Seeds of Kindness charity album, Building Bridges. Musicians, heed our call!

Over the years, Bronies for Good has raised over $200,000 for various impactful charity projects, thanks to the creative contributions of the fandom's many talented musicians and artists, and the generosity of thousands of fans who want to make the world a better place.  

Our new fundraiser will launch in November, along with the album, and all funds will benefit the highly effective prevention program of the Against Malaria Foundation.    

The Music

The Seeds of Kindness albums feature hours of music from both up and coming artists and old time fandom favorite musicians alike. You can download our previous releases from our fundraiser page.

The albums encompass genres from dance to orchestral to ska to rock to 80s metal to hip-hop, and include contributions from musicians such as EileMonty, Feather, Forest Rain, So Great and Powerful, and Carbon Maestro.

The Theme

Our new album theme, epitomized by the title of Building Bridges, is global empathy: There is a vanguard among us who care equally about feeling beings of all species and ...

We now have a set schedule for our Effective Altruism Berlin meetups.

Place: VEBU, 4th floor (counting EG as 0th floor), Genthiner Str. 48, 10785 Berlin

Time: Every second Sunday, at 2 p.m. local time, starting June 7, 2015

We now have a bit of a loose agenda that we determine by voting on Trello. We also organize the projects that we work on via Trello. I can give you access at the meetup.

You can also find us on Meetup and Facebook, and we have a newsletter for event reminders.

Please stop by if you would like to chat about EA or if you have any questions.

Our third Effective Altruism Berlin meetup is about to happen!

Place: VEBU, 4th floor (counting EG as 0th floor), Genthiner Str. 48, 10785 Berlin

Time: Sunday, May 24, 2015, 2 p.m. local time

Please stop by if you would like to chat about EA or if you have any questions. We now have a bit of a loose agenda that we determine by voting on Trello. I can give you access at the meetup.

Apart from our meetup, there is also the effective altruism talk of the Swiss GBS that takes place in rooms of the Humboldt Universität in Berlin-Adlershof.

Place: Room 005, Walter Nernst-Haus, Newtonstraße 14, 12489 Berlin

Time: Thursday, May 21, 2015, 5–7 p.m. local time

We’re looking forward to seeing you there too!

I’m organizing a meetup for effective altruism in Berlin, and Sebastian of VEBU kindly provides the meeting room for it.

Place: VEBU, 4th floor (counting EG as 0th floor), Genthiner Str. 48, 10785 Berlin

Time: Sunday, April 19, 2015, 2 p.m. local time

The Brony Fair convention, April 11–12, 2015, in Berlin, Germany, sponsored a vendor’s booth for us, Bronies for Good. Sara Nowak and I ran the booth and also distributed effective altruism leaflets around the venue. I will estimate their conversion rates in about a week.

At the booth, we accepted donations for the Against Malaria Foundation and gave out buttons, pins, artwork, and copies of the Bound Together comic anthology as thank yous. The performance was as follows:

• 25 copies of Bound Together given out
• 2 Bound Together preorders served
• 11 metal pins given out
• about 3 postcards given out
• 12 newsletter subscribers gained

We did not keep track of the number of buttons given out.

The donation performance was as follows:

We did not count the coins smaller than €1 on the first day (hence the “remainder”), and on the second day only counted the overall total, so that we calculated the subtotal for the day from the overall total.

All donations have been forwarded to the Against Malaria Foundation. They amount to 377 nets.

The 157 Bronies for Good flyers we handed out ...

Good news to those who love art, comics, and helpfulness—Bound Together is off to the presses and will be in your hands in a few short weeks.

Bound Together is our original charity comic and art anthology, enjoyable for readers of all ages. Top quality artists in the fandom collaborated on this high-quality, full-color, and professionally printed book featuring 52 pages of pony comic stories and individual art pieces: KefkaFloyd (project director), Adlynh, Bakertoons, Centchi, Emberwisp, fxcellent, Jowybean, Leekfish, Muffinshire, Pasteur, Ponywise, Sofas And Quills, Spectralunicorn, Starry Night, and Steve Holt! While PixelKitties had to withdraw due to scheduling conflicts, she sends her earnest support for the project and we brought on additional artists like Emberwisp, Centchi, and fxcellent to help make the book even better.

Some artists have already posted samples of their contributions, which you can see here. That’s just a taste, as you can only see all of the comics and artwork by donating for the book.

True to its theme of teamwork and togetherness, all buyers are also collaborators on our joint effort to combat malaria. The revenue generated by Bound Together goes towards the Against Malaria Foundation’s outstanding prevention program. Each copy ...

We’ve become such a huge community, bustling with generosity! But what is even more important is that we know that our generosity cannot be an end in itself. Generosity is only as good as the good it does for those we help.

And we can help tremendously if we do it right. It is big-hearted and bold to treat strangers like friends—it is also necessary. The millions of people in extreme poverty and at risk of malaria are strangers to most of us, but they are the people who need our help most and they are also the people we can help most effectively. Let us prove to them that this world is not too big and never cold!

The Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) has been making distance irrelevant for over a decade. With mere monetary donations, people from around the world can save the lives of those who would otherwise have succumbed to malaria. And because AMF is one of the most effective charities in the world, even small donations—$3 for a mosquito net—have a great impact. That is why we have dedicated Seeds of Kindness to fundraising for AMF.

This year GalaCon will dedicate ...