Milestone! 10,500 Games Prepped.
It’s been a quiet few months for The Spiel Foundation online, but behind the scenes, we have been tremendously BUSY!
Yesterday, our game bundle program passed a significant milestone.
One year and one day ago, we received a very large shipment of donated games from Ravensburger.
The initial delivery was over 6,000 games. It filled an entire semi-truck!
Since that point, we have accepted deliveries from many publishers large and small, pushing the total number of games donated or purchased to 10,500 games.
That’s 2,000+ 5-game bundles we will deliver to community centers, libraries, homeless and domestic violence shelters, boys & girls clubs, schools, and hospitals across the United States and Canada!
Every game included in a Spiel Foundation bundle arrives prepped and ready to play.
This means the components are punched out and bagged so nothing will get lost, and parts that need assembly are put together. This might seem like overkill. It is not. Prepping each game insures that each bundle has the best possible chance to be enjoyed by hundreds of players for years to come.
Now, I love punching out and assembling new games for my personal game collection. It’s a hidden pleasure to sort and punch and bag all the parts. Getting everything ready for fun is a kind of fun all on its own.
However… when faced with thousands and thousands of games… this fun wears thin!
It is arduous, tedious and thankless work but also very rewarding and meditative. And this work is absolutely essential to our goal. We know that each bundle can open a door to the wider world of play and games to so many people!
So, the milestone.
Yesterday, one year and one day after the first delivery, I completed prep work on all 10,500 games!
It was a lonely and trying time in some respects. A task so big cannot be accomplished in a week or a month or even six! But accepting this task, really owning it, was also a very rewarding experience. It has been an object lesson in how great things can be accomplished through incremental progress. Do the work. Be relentless. And, over time, small successes begin to stack up in a way that will surprise you when you step back and look up.
This milestone represents a huge leap forward for the Spiel Foundation’s game bundle program. In a year, we have gone from prepping and delivering hundreds of games to tens of thousands.
But the work isn’t done yet!
Phase two will begin in late August. And this time I plan to have help!
Once I have rearranged our rented warehouse space (graciously provided by Bright Corp. in Anderson Indiana), we will have an assembly line set up so prepped games can be assembled into assorted bundles and packed into boxes
I will invite small teams of Spielers to come help pack games once everything is arranged.
Phase three will be paying for shipping and delivering bundles to organizations that fit our mandate across the US and Canada.
Our goal is to have all 10,500 games, all 2,100 bundles delivered before the end of the year.
This will still take a tremendous amount of time and money to accomplish.
The Spiel Foundation needs your help in both regards!
If you’re interested in packing games this Fall, send me a message: stephen@thespielfoundation.com
Whether it’s a few dollars or a lot more, follow the link below to donate. Your financial support is absolutely critical to our success.
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/donate-widget/5961
For obvious and important reasons, one of our main sources of income, Spiel-a-thons, fundraisers we host at conventions and conferences, have had to be postponed. We certainly hope the world is in a state for us to host Spielathons again next year. But in the meantime, we are facing tremendous costs as we grow.
The most optimistic estimate puts our shipping costs beyond $20,000. And we already have a few thousand games headed our way for another wave of bundles next year!
We are also making great strides toward our own facility here in Indianapolis, the DeKoven Center for Play. It will have a warehouse for our bundle program plus a game library and dedicated play space and room for seminars and offices.
Dreams this big don’t come cheap.
We believe play is a powerful positive force in the world.
Everything we do at The Spiel Foundation is driven by this idea.
We hope you will be inspired by the work we do to join us as a Champion for Fun as a donor, sponsor, or volunteer!
