Latest in a series of posts on the Swifts
The Swifts are the official City Bird of Bethlehem
They need your help
Chimney saving a success.
Now let’s talk about money.
Most of the Swift Team are reticent about and reluctant to talk about money.
Not The Gadfly.
The fund-raising stalled a long time ago.
So what will the Swift kitty be used for, you ask?
Originally, some of the money was ear-marked for the additional cost to developer John Noble to save the chimney rather than just leveling the whole site.
Not so any longer.
Developer John Noble is, as they say, eating the additional cost to his project so that the GoFundMe can be used for education purposes.
At the Forum last week, John said, “This is one of these things that I personally have a passion for. The GoFundMe site, I think, at this point is one of those things best used for education. We’ve also talked about putting cameras in the site so people can see in real time what is going on. So, from a future standpoint, everything that we do on this GoFundMe is going to be purely ear-marked for education and actually taking it and putting it toward cameras. This is kind of a project that both me and my family are just so excited to do that it’s irrelevant of the cost. It’s that fun. Everyone in my family is excited about it. And we’re going to make sure that we not only do it right but that we educate the entire community on what’s going on there.”
Now, that’s absolutely remarkable!
Lehigh Valley Audubon Society president Peter Saenger said of Noble, that his engagement in such a project is “extremely unusual, almost unheard of,” and what Noble just said about the importance of education “almost made {him] cry. . . . John is probably less than 1% of developers that you will run in to, he’s golden, and so unique, it’s incredible. . . . If we could only get half the developers to have a tenth of his spirit, this world world would be so much better. Incredible. And shocking. And wonderful.” (Picture of Noble in his spare time.)
And what might an educational project look like?
Jennie Gilrain is already “cooking up” an educational project! She’s going to bring local poets into her 4th grade class at Freemansburg Elementary, at least one bilingual, so the students will write poetry about the Swifts as they learn about them and join with students in Peru and Bolivia (joining the two poles of the Swift migration!) in a bilingual poetry reading inspired by the Swifts. “We don’t quite have the funding all lined up yet,” says Jennie, “but we’re going to do it anyway.”
We gotta help out with this Jennie-project and other projects that will arise, right?
Gadfly hesitates to use the blog for fundraising. He thinks he remembers asking you to sponsor him on the 10-mile Christmas Peace Walk from Nazareth to Bethlehem a year or two ago that LEPOCO was involved in — but probably not much, if anything, else.
But this is a worthy cause, a Bethlehem community cause.
Gadfly doesn’t pay attention to his blog statistics, but he happened to notice that The Gadfly had 600 hits Monday. Not sure if that was a good day or a bad day. But think of the good that 600 x $5, 600 x $10, 600 x $25, 600 x $$$ can do.
Brothas and sistas, can you spare a few bucks?
And Gadfly bets that you have Swift lovers in your families and on your social media networks, even if they don’t know it yet.