Attention Brooklyn Greeners

In celebration of Earth Day, It’s My Park! Day, Bike Month and spring planting season, Brooklyn Community Foundation and ioby are proud to announce the Brooklyn Spring Match to support Brooklyn-based environmental projects. If your organization helps encourage the protection and creation of open space, parks and community gardens or seeks new ways to introduce and encourage environmental awareness in all neighborhoods through grassroots programming, we want you to join us!

From April 11-May 6, the Foundation’s micro-grants program will match donations to eligible ioby Brooklyn projects dollar-for-dollar! That means a $10 donation turns into $20, $25 turns into $50 and so on up to donations of $200 until we’ve raised at total of $10,000 for these great causes.

Founded to help neighbors turn great ideas into environmental change at the local level, ioby is the only online crowd-funding platform created specifically to support and measure the collective impact of small environmental action in New York City. You can use ioby to raise funds, find volunteers and post photo and video updates about your neighborhood environmental projects.

Since 1998, the Brooklyn Community Foundation’s micro-grants program has provided $500 grants to volunteer-run Brooklyn organizations with organizational budgets less than $50,000. Many of these small grants have seeded some of today’s incredible and effective local nonprofits in Brooklyn like Added Value, the New York Writers Coalition, Girls for Gender Equity and countless others.

The Brooklyn Spring Match will help community gardens, parks, beaches and school based gardens come to life this spring and leverage the Foundation’s micro-grants program to build a network of citizen donors in Brooklyn. To qualify for the match, you must meet ioby’s criteria, be based in Brooklyn, be volunteer-run and propose a project with a budget of less than $1,000. Click here to get started. Applications are due March 31, 2010, so please don’t delay!