Okay, so here's the set up. Two years ago a couple of friends and I came up with the idea of using our church basement to hold concerts for local garage bands. We called it MusicHaven, and wanted it to be a safe place for kids to play and listen to music. The church actually liked the idea (believe me, I was surprised!!) since we wanted this to be a safe alternative to having local kids go into downtown Portland late at night. We held our first concert on October 1 of 2003. We had three bands play, and ended up with about 120 kids attending (not bad for only putting out 50 flyers!!)
Well, it's 2 years later now. We have had almost 50 different bands play, and are consistantly pulling in 60+ people. Not the greatest turn out to a concert ever, but not bad for a bunch of high-school garage bands promoting by word-of-mouth. We are all official with our non-profit tax ID number, a website that gets updated whenever Matt gets to it (
www.musichaven.org ) our own bank account, and a bit of grant money from a couple of sources.
Here's my dilema. The bass player for one of the bands that used to play at MusicHaven is now the Student Activities Coordinator at the local community college, where I attend. He wants to have MusicHaven up there. He knows we don't want to move locales, so he wants us to set up a second branch on campus staffed by student and faculty.
Now, this is a big step for us. We are still trying to get our name out there, and get new and cool bands to come and play. The problem we have run into in the past, though, is that it's kinda hard to get 13-18 year olds to come to a free concert on a Saturday night. At a college with 25,000 students, however, we are almost assured a large crowd.
This is where I, I mean we, need advice. Should we give them access to our name and logo, write up a contract, and set them on their merry way? Should we try and have a more direct control over this by making sure that ORIGINAL MusicHaven staff members are on the new committee? Or should we tell them to use the idea but not the name?
Remember, this is all being done by unpaid highschool volunteers. All of our equipment has been bought with donations (which we need badly, hint hint
) and the vast majority if us have real lives (school, work, etc.)
I'm at a loss. I'm not sure what we should do. I could see this spiraling out of control very quickly, or I could see it die just as fast. Any recommendations? And please, no silly stuff. This is something that I take seriously. I've put a lot of time, effort, and even money into this, and I want to see it blossom into something that I can be really proud of.
If you want directions to the next event, or want to donate, please e-mail or PM me. Or visit the website. Or fly over here and hand me a large pile of money. Small bills, unmarked and non-sequential, please.
Rock on
Eric
