By Carol Hiltner | President, Altai Mir University
Your donations have been supporting Altai artists to create videos of Altai legends using the medium of "painting" with sand on a light table.
In an effort to improve their professionalism, they have reached out to the Carolyn Leaf of Canada, who is a pioneer in such painting. She recommended that they develop the skills, not only to make images with the sand, but to actually animate their images through manipulation of the sand. For that, our team will need better equipment as well as seed funding.
So our Altai project leaders have been not only investigating opportunities for such funding within the Altai Republic governmental ministries of culture and tourism, but also reaching out for international grants and fellowships. Here in the US, we are supporting this effort by using grant databases to search for likely funding sources. We have been encouraging them to use a business model---selling their DVDs to tourists---in addition to their philanthropic model.
This work is important because of its global implications. Many Native Americans recognize Altai as the starting point of their journey across the Bering Straits. Altai legends are therefore important not only to the indigenous peoples of Russia, but also of the Americas.
Thank you for your ongoing support. It makes a huge difference.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
