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Ballard Corners Park

I’ve indirectly mentioned Ballard Corners Park before, in a photo per day in June.

It’s now time, however, to throw my hat (and heart) in the ring and do the full on “nothing-comes-for-free-in-America-isn’t-neighbourhood-fund-raising-a-great-thing” thing.

I live in Ballard (inballard, wikipedia), it’s a nice little community but by a freak of its past it’s short of green spaces i.e. parks.

A few blocks from our house there are two lots that are being re-purposed for a neighbourhood park under the Green Spaces/Pro Parks Levy. Politics aside, we hope to build (in 2008) a child-friendly park that can act as a locus for the local families. Ballard is so short of parks that the open area built beside the public library as part of a corporate “we want to build condos on top of our grocery store” deal is frequented by children in the summer (ok, the fountains help).

The working title for this project is Ballard Corners Park and the committee is called Friends of Ballards Corners Park. More details can be found at the main website at http://ballardcornerspark.org. I say the working name of the park is “Ballard Corners” only because the final name is decided by the Seattle Parks dept. and will probably be named after a dead councillor’s wife or Bill Gates’ dog. But that’s not really the point.

The park costs upwards of $400,000. Yup, $400,000. Not cheap but it looks good. And a significant portion of the money has to be raised through fund-raising, sponsorship and “matching”.

Although not part of the committee I’ve been helping out in whatever way I can. Danika and I have attended a few meetings and banked a few volunteer hours. Danika has planted bulbs in the rain to pretty-up our wasteland lot for the spring. I’ve helped out on the pending t-shirts. And I’m helping raise money from friends and family by skimming affiliate money for a good cause from internet shopping monsters such as Amazon.com.

So if you’re about to shop at Amazon.com to buy Danika a 30th birthday present (hint, hint) or Thanksgiving or the pending holidays. Don’t just shop at Amazon. Shop at Amazon by using this link, or going to ballardcornerspark.org/shop (where hopefully over time more than Amazon will be featured), or access the Ballard Corners Park Amazon Store.

This method gives upwards of 4% of revenue to the funds, and you can bet every little helps. We’re also working with local companies (such as Elephants Gerald for t-shirts) so this represents an ability for non-locals to help the community Danika and I live in.

And you’re going to see links appear both on bluefacedpixie.com and planetdanika.com in the near future (once I recover from a Mac wipe that has set me back weeks in terms of technology). These features use Amazon links to perform magic recommendations that are relevant to you, but we will also use simple “shop at amazon” links too:

Photo Books at Amazon.com

and search boxes:

All of these will credit money to our parks project. You can also make non-profit tax free donations using these instructions.

And finally, if you are an internet/blog user (I’m looking at hellion and dogcow and my readership of 3 here) then add these links to your blogs/websites (sorry for the crappy wrapping and naff formatting):

Omakase links


<script type="text/javascript">
<!--

amazon_ad_tag = "ballardcorner-20"; amazon_ad_width = "120"; amazon_ad_height = "240";
amazon_color_border = "4363EE"; amazon_color_link = "4363EE"; amazon_color_logo = "FFFFFF";
amazon_ad_logo = "hide"; amazon_ad_link_target = "new"; amazon_ad_price = "retail";
amazon_ad_border = "hide";
//-->
</script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/s/ads.js"></script>

Update: the above code rarely works due to the vagaries of wordpress quoting and marking – if you want the code, email me

Product Boxes (this ones for Photography Books)

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/b?%5Fencoding=UTF8&node=1&tag=ballardcorner-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325">Photo Books at Amazon.com</a><img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=ballardcorner-20&l=ur2&o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />

Search Boxes

<iframe src="http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=ballardcorner-20&o=1&p=27&l=qs1&f=ifr" width="180" height="150" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

This code includes the affiliate magic that will direct the funds to Ballard Corners Park.

Thank you for reading so far.

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