Fundraising pitch for Poetry in America educational project mentioning Leon Black donation and Harvard ties

designed to meet the needs of English Language Arts and Social Studies teachers in the US and internationally. ° We are eager to begin production of The Poetry of Earth, Sea, and Sky. Designed, too, for Middle and High School teachers, The Poetry of Earth, Sea, and Sky will draw English Language Arts instruction into dialogue with science, and will include extraordinary footage of the natural world, conversations with poets, scholars, and scientists as well as footage shot in class and in the field with great teachers. ° A recent partnership with Greenwich Country Day School and the Success Academy Network of charter schools will provide a base for the production of a new collection of classroom-ready educational material on The Poetry of Art, Sport, and Play. This collection will include discussions on poems filmed everywhere from sports fields to Broadway theaters, and will feature dancers, athletes, fashion designers, and more. ° With a growing archive of footage capturing teachers and students reading American poems, we are eager to expand our reach and move into America’s schools, disseminating, testing, and learning from teachers and students using our materials. We hope to be able to begin work evaluating the impact of poetry on literacy levels and character development and, eventually, to produce a full suite of materials that foster character development along with intellectual growth. Working closely with such partners as The Nantucket Project, Nautilus Magazine, The Aspen Ideas Festival, and The Big Think, and, of course, HarvardX, Harvard’s provider of free open online courses, we are continuing to create rich educational media on poetry for adult learners and lifelong learners. These materials include short form videos such as this one on Robert Pinsky’s “Shirt” (as featured in The New Yorker), and, this spring, the sixth module of the free seven-part Poetry in America MOOC, which has registrants in over 150 countries. Growing rapidly, and outpacing our current staff and infrastructure, Poetry in America has a fundraising goal this year of 2.5 million dollars to fund its expanding group of projects. We’ve taken a big step, hiring the design agency Threespot to help us develop our web presence. Our website— to launch early 2016— will eventually serve as an online hub for our TV show and educational projects. We hope you'll join us then for a virtual launch! Finally, Jeffrey, you have been such a wonderful supporter of my Poetry in America project. The Leon Black gift changed everything for me last year. It paid salaries for staff | desperately needed to complete projects (detail below), but first and foremost, it gave me leverage, enabling me to set down a Solid Harvard base for my activities by giving the school something to point to: this public humanities project among the list of projects the Dean supports. The money did it: as soon as they heard about the gift, they took my project more seriously. Because of that gift, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which is space-stingy, found and rewired a studio space for me to house my video production operation and team. That gift woke up the Deans to the importance of Harvard's role in producing the highest quality humanities content for the WORLD, and not just for Harvard students. My main employee has half of her salary paid with these funds, and the foundation of our collection for PBS LearningMedia is being made with this support. This gift represented one of the most consequential shifts of the last year, allowing me create content and launch projects this year that make future projects that much more likely. If | can keep this base sturdy at Harvard, refilling these coffers, | will be that much more able to keep working. | am also so grateful for the help you gave me in defining my project for Templeton, and, what help you have offered to give in bringing them around. | have, since Templeton turned me down, gotten funding to produce video on two of the poems I'd proposed to Templeton and to create, and test, that HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029240