It might have been cloudy and raining outside in Capital Hill, Seattle, but inside at Hold Your Crown/King Youngblood’s new headquarters at WeWork, the room was all sunshine, smiles, and optimism. Hold Your Crown Board members led by King Youngblood’s cellist who also serves as Hold Your Crown’s Executive Director - Cory Cavazos - led the HYC team in a serious but also fun planning meeting. Present were Cameron Lavi-Jones - leader of King Youngblood and Board member of Hold Your Crown, as well as Board Members Daniel Cavazos and King Youngblood’s co-manager Lara Lavi. The first half of the day was spent getting schooled by Hold Your Crown’s grant writer and fundraising coach Dr. Jeffrey Perkins BS, MPA, Ph.D., a virtual guru for grant-writing, planning & development. The team has identified several regional grants and efforts are underway to write up the grant proposals and hope for the best in this highly competitive arena.
The team also discussed the planned February 29, 2020 - Leap Year Day - launch of their direct to fans and community Go Fund Me Fund Raiser. The goal of this Hold Your Crown fundraiser is to raise $7500 in tax-deductible donations through Hold Your Crown’s fiscal sponsor Allied Arts Foundation of Seattle. Folks can support Hold Your Crown now by clicking to donate here. The tagline for the fundraiser is “Take The Leap and support Hold Your Crown.”
To get ready for this big fundraising drive, the entire King Youngblood band - Cory, Cameron, Hamoon and Alex - plus some more wonderful musicians, university students, and entertainment industry professionals showed up to tell their stories and create filmed public service announcements to support the fund drive and overall Hold Your Crown message.
“We shot PSAs with the message - Stomp out the stigma about Youth Mental Illness, End the Silence, You are Not Alone, Whenever up becomes down we will always be here Holding Your Crown, and Here is Where You can go and get Help,” explains Cory.
Hold Your Crown plans to enlist 100s to 1000’s of artists, students, practitioners and entertainment industry professionals and everyone supportive to create their own video PSA on their smartphone and share through social media with the Hold Your Crown URL www.holdyourcrown.org. All funds raised will go towards more online advertising to promote the mission, travel to schools to make live presentations, the cost of keeping the grant writers and PR team going, video production and social media management. Special thanks to Shawn The Shamen and his band members from Dirty Tribe, Quinton Peters - videographer extraordinaire and the University of Washington Katharine for their brave contributions.
Hold Your Crown’s mission is to change the culture about youth mental illness and the path to mental health wellness through peer to peer storytelling, music and key partnerships working directly with middle college-age school, high school, and college-age youth. Hold Your Crown is partnering with the King County Mental Health Court, NAMI Eastside and many others. Watch for our Speak Your Truth Campaign which launches concurrently with our fundraising efforts on February 29, 2020.