Pasco Environmentalist Using Web to Fund Documentary

Eric Stewart is an instructor at , an Odessa-based business that specializes in environmentally friendly gardening. For years, he has visited places throughout the Tampa Bay area to learn about environmental sustainability, and has shot videos of what he’s learned and posted them on YouTube.

The Holiday resident's. 

Now, he’s attempting to rally Internet users to help him fund a documentary that will highlight environmentally friendly businesses in the Tampa Bay area that are working toward developing a "green cconomy," according to Stewart. He’s also seeking funding for his various web efforts to promote environmental sustainability, including his website Code Green Community.

"The vision is to show how our local bio-region can transition away from fossil fuels and have a healthier lifestyle that repairs our ecosystem," according to Stewart.

How’s Stewart drumming up the needed green? He has created a project on Kickstarter, an online funding platform that uses crowdsourcing to net the money sought for creative projects. 

Once a person’s project proposal is reviewed posted on the Kickstarter site, visitors can start pledging money to it.

Projects on Kickstarter have specific fundraising goals and deadlines. If the project meets its fundraising goal by its deadline, its creator gets the money.

No money changes hands if the project does not get fully funded. Project creators get full ownership of their project and control of it. Kickstarter gets a portion of the funds raised.

At least $18,000 must be pledged through Stewart’s project page on Kickstarter by 10:18 p.m. May 2 to get the effort funded by the site. The project was 1-percent funded as of Monday night.

The proposed documentary, “Tampa Bay Green Living Economy," will concentrate on how businesses in the region, including GreenDreams, are moving toward environmentally sustainable ideas and practices. Subjects covered may include things such as backyard market gardens, farmers markets, organic farms, food forests, cooperative businesses and local food restaurants.

Here’s how Stewart described it in an email:

”GreenDreams is going to be in the documentary, and the movie will be mainly about a narrative of the people of Tampa Bay area seeing themselves as wholly connected and interconnected with everyone else throughout the Tampa Bay, whether its how we get our electricity, our food, our water, and the quality of our air. A move from a linear economic system to a circular economic system that treats people, the planet, and resources in ways that don't use and extract them but partner and empower them to grow. How we can create an economy that’s resilient to future economic shocks.”

In addition to funding production and promotion of the documentary, the Kickstarter money also would help finance Stewart’s Code Green Community website (http://codegreencommunity.com) and more than 100 YouTube videos. It also will be used to expand an online map of the Tampa Bay area’s Green Living Economy, which plots out environmentally sustainable businesses.

Donors to Stewart’s projects can get rewards based on they amount they contribute.

To find out more abut the project, visit its Kickstarter page.

To pledge a donation, click on “Back This Project."

Want an example of a Kickstarter success story? Check out how Double Fine used the site to fund creation of a new point-and-click adventure game.