Once a month we'll be bringing you a look at some of the best local Kickstarter campaigns in order to let you know what's getting ready to be unleashed through the help of small investors.
Our Little Soldiers: A Book for Children Living with HIV: Now, I have gone on record a time or three about how I detest people raising money for writing books on Kickstarter. The legitimate reasons that someone would need to crowdsource a book are few and far between. In that article I just linked to, I neglected to mention something like Our Little Soldiers.
Dr. Bobby Ricketts is a resident at Texas Children's Hospital specializing in treating children with HIV/AIDS while stationed in Sub-Sahara Africa. Yes, that is in fact the saddest sentence I have ever typed. One of the problems that Dr. Ricketts runs into in treatment is noncompliance with the medication. According to him, patients miss up to 30 percent of their doses.
His solution? A children's book designed to show patients the power of the medicines locked in an epic battle with the disease. He's tried using this analogy vocally with patients to pretty good effect, but feels that a 20-page illustrated book with pictures by R.J. Matson would make more of an impact.
He wants $9,000 to work up and print as many of these as possible to hand out to patients, and the project is completely non-profit. The material rewards for investing aren't great. You have to drop $50 to end up with a copy of the physical book, but guess what? That book you just got is one less book being used to treat a child with freakin' HIV. This is one of those projects you contribute to based entirely on it's charitable goal... though if you've got $500 to spend they'll illustrate you or someone you choose as a soldier fighting the disease. That's the sort of thing you want on your resume.
Goal: $9,000 by January 4.
Piece continues on next page.
