Orlando Soup

Orlando SOUP (Facebook) is a micro-granting dinner where attendees pay $7, listen to quick presentations on four local projects, eat dinner, and then vote on where they want $5 of their donation to go.

Their first dinner is tonight at East End Market, but it’s already sold out.

For a donation of $7, attendees receive soup (made by Slow Food Orlando using fresh, local ingredients), salad and bread.

Before dinner is served, attendees will listen to four short community project proposals covering a range of topics such as art, urban agriculture, social justice, social entrepreneurship, education, technology, and more.

During dinner, attendees cast a vote for their favorite project and, at the end of the night, the project that receives the most votes is funded by $5 from each attendees’ donation. Winners will appear at future SOUP dinners to report their project’s progress.

Organizer and friend of Bungalower Alex Lehnoff tells us that while they were planning on doing the dinner quarterly, due to the overwhelming response to the first event, they’re already working on their next dinner for the end of the summer.

Since not everyone who wants to make it can, we’re going to spoil the surprise and let you know about the presenters at tonight’s event:

  • Jimmy Sherfey will present the Florida Coffee Symposium. This is a miniature conference celebrating the culture of coffee producers at origins across the globe. It also seeks to inform consumers and retailers of the challenges facing the industry across the supply chain, as well as allow a space for Central Florida coffee businesses to hone their craft and discuss best marketing practices in an increasingly democratized industry.
  • Brendan O’Connor will present Pop-up University, an effort to democratize education and create more informed and active citizens. The Pop-up U is a retrofitted inflatable bounce house which houses university level courses featuring the best of Central Florida academia. Subjects will include: Urban Planning, Humanities, Poverty and Social Welfare, History, Astronomy and Science.
  • Ashley Pollard will present VendArt. VendArt would restore and retrofit used vending machines and replace the usual unhealthy and over processed foods and candy, otherwise dispensable items, with indispensable works of art. Dispensing the Indispensable. VendArt would solicit artists to contribute pieces to be included for sale in the machines.  These could showcase a wide range of medium including painted canvases, photographs, collages, silk screened fabric swatches, bound poetry or literature
  • Chris Castro and Clayton Ferrara will present Project ReThink. Through this project, they will raise awareness about our environmental impacts through a creative street art initiative we are calling “sustainable graffiti”, with a goal of changing people’s behaviors and #ReThink their impacts on the environment.

If you are interested in presenting your idea, you can watch for application information on their Facebook page.

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