So… have you heard about this whole Chase Giving thing?

Ha. Kidding.

We were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves in the top 200. We were even more pleasantly surprised to find ourselves staying there. Okay then, we said, let’s go for it. We tweeted, we sent Facebook messages, we wrote notes and cajoling status updates… just like everyone else did. The resulting caucophony was all of Chicago Theaterdom rooting and voting for each other, and all saying pretty much the same thing:

VOTE FOR US!

Sure, okay. But why?

The short answer is we could really really use the money. Theater is rarely considered a Real Charity outside our own community, and getting funding is tough. Nothing new there, right?

WAFF tries not to ask for donations (full disclosure: we did hold a Bowl-a-thon in 2006) as a general rule. We also, in case you haven’t been paying attention, accept food in lieu of cash for admission to our shows, which goes to local organizations who can get it to where it is needed in the community. We average 500-700 pounds of food donated per production. Not being math people, we can’t really tell you how many meals that makes, but multiply it by all the shows we’ve produced in our 12 years of existence (not counting the extra food we’ve brought in at festivals and through partnerships with other theater companies), and you get something like “holy-wow that’s a lot.”

So of course we don’t make a lot of money. And we always struggle as a result of it. Space for performance and rehearsals is not cheap for a company without a place to call home. That monster eats up about half (or more) of our budget for every single production. And chasing spaces drains time and resources that could be put to better use. It would be magical to just be able to focus on the production and our mission. If we can collect as much food as we do in our present situation, imagine how many people we could feed if that situation was improved, even temporarily.

Call it a cushion, a relief, a freebie. It would be welcomed, offered a drink, and told to kick off its shoes and stay a while.

Now, in our little WAFFly dreams, we would love to team up with a few other companies to put down some real roots and establish residency in a shared space:

• It would facilitate collaboration and sharing of resources as well as foster opportunities to grow all the companies involved, both organizationally and artistically.

• Having established ourselves in a neighborhood, we would be better able to offer more community engagement; classes, events, workshops, etc.

• Setting up a permanent food collection site would enable and encourage our patrons, those of our partner companies, and the general public to donate.

• We would be able to really focus our energies on our missions, while also creating some breathing room for experimentation and risk-taking.

There’s more, of course. It goes without saying that we’d love to be able to pay our artists more, participate in more community events, etc. But not being chicken-counters, we’ll try to reign it in at the moment. The bottom line is that we’d love to grow. We want to have the freedom to do more artistically as well as to increase our contribution to the Chicago community. And we want to do it working with friends.

WAFF wants to continue supporting the community for a very long time;
we just need a little support from you to make that happen.
Thank you with a capital THANK YOU.

Will Act For Food

Andrew Jordan, Corri Feuerstein, CW van Baale, Jill Frederickson, Melissa Tropp, Scott Pasko
Catherine Dughi, Eric Frederickson, Jenna Rabideaux, Missy Styles

And hey, any potential partners reading this and want to talk more? Let’s grab a beer some time. Drop us a line with the subject line “Flippy Scoop Bop.” Just because it’ll give us a giggle.