The Local 'n Vocal Project is the brainchild of the Rotary Club of St Kilda.

In its heyday Rotary St Kilda raised money by running a Miss St Kilda Pageant - not such a classy thing today, but back then it allowed the club to raise heaps of cash to give out to our local community.

It got us thinking - what could we do today that would engage our community and help us to raise money for organisations that work hard to do good in our world.




We have a focus for the 2014/15 year which is 'youth homelessness'. We selected a few amazing organisations who work really hard in this area who we felt needed and deserved some support :

Kids under Cover; offers housing, scholarships and mentors for homeless and at-risk young people throughout Victoria
Open Family / White Lion; run outreach support and services to young people who are homeless or at-risk of homelessness in Victoria & NSW.
St Kilda Gatehouse; are currently running a targeted project in Dandenong that is working to help young women who are at the risk of sexual exploitation or are in the early beginning of street sex work.

St Kilda is the home of live music and creativity; so we thought that our fundraising should be creative and inline with our local culture. We came up with a plan to create a music album and to ask young emerging musicians to contribute to the album; this would create a product that our 3 charities could use to fundraise for their cause.

We have been really lucky; Jack Howard from Hunters & Collectors came on early and supported our idea. Through his magnificent efforts we now have 7 tracks ready to go - but we need more!

How you can help?

We need more music -
Do you know a young musician/band that would like to be a part of our project and get some good kharma and publicity for a good cause?
We are asking young emerging musicians to contribute an original song. You can do this simply by applying via email to [email protected] or send us a PM on facebook.com/stkildarotary. We will follow up with all the info; you can also checkout our website at www.localnvocal.com.au

We need a bit more professional talent -
If anyone out there owns a recording studio; has mixing & mastering experience, is a dynamo in PR - and you have a philanthropic heart - we want to hear from you. We are looking for 'in kind sponsors' now. We want this project to be amazing and we want to raise oodles of cash for our charity friends; we know we can get this project done on our own but to make it awesome we need more help.

We need a bit more money -
So far we have raised $7,500 through the fabulous support of our sponsors:
Rotary District 9800, StreetSmart, & St Kilda Village - this has been added to $5,000 that we have contributed to the project ourselves (all those sausage sizzles were exhausting; however my dog Arnie thinks I now smell great). We just need a little bit more cash. The truth is the more cash we raise the more opportunities we can provide on our album; the more amazing our record launch will be and the more money we can hand over to our charity friends.



Who is already helping?
Our funding sponsors so far are:
       
Silver Sponsors : Rotary District 9800, StreetSmart, & St Kilda Village.

Our 'in kind' sponsors are:
City of Port Phillip (use of the Community Bus to transport students & use of the St Kilda Town Hall for our record launch)
Web Prophets (website design & hosting; creative design etc)

What is the experience like for young musicians?
Below is a photo essay from Jack Howard of the music recording day for Wesley Year 10 students at The Aviary recording studio from August 2014:

Music Production = $6,000 - $8,000
CD duplication (2,500-5,000 CDs) = $3000 - $5000 (the more CDs we make the more we can sell)
Promotion = $3,000
Album Launch Event = $4,500 (food, drink & staff) based on 300 people attending

Basically we are aiming that 100% of our album sales go to the 3 charities involved to support the work that they do. To do this we need supporters & sponsors now to cover the remainder of our production costs.

Things are getting tight - we have a launch booked in for August 20th. We need to have our album completed by the last two weeks of June to allow production time of the CDs for launch. If we run over schedule we will have to produce CDs locally at a higher rate (which will impact our contributions to charity) or encourage people to download their purchase from iTunes (which costs us more too) or another Digital record store.