As many of you know, I have entered a contest as a means of trying to get funding for a project which is deeply important to me. Details about it can be found here, and some dear, lovely folks have written more about it here and here. In a nutshell, The Husband and I want to travel to notorious walls throughout the world and photograph and interview the people who live next to them, taking down their stories and showing clearly how these walls have impacted their lives. Our dream is to put it all into a book, with the hopes that this effort will make people rethink the role walls play in our lives, and whether there might be other, better ways to confront our differences.

To get a shot at winning the funding for this project, we have to stay in the top 20 most popular (read: has most votes) ideas in the contest. We did really well for the first few weeks, but over the last week we have begun to slip down the ranks, and as I am writing this we are sitting at #28, despite all our efforts and the support of the approximately 385 people who have voted for us so far.

I am writing this today to solicit ideas. Thus far we have emailed everyone we know, established a Facebook group, made a video, created a website, and made postcards explaining the idea and the contest which we passed out to folks we know in the hopes they would pass them on. It's hard to imagine what else we can do...but when I see that the top vote-getters in the contest are sitting on 500-1000 votes (!!), I feel like we must be missing something.

I know the community here at Newsvine pretty well, and I have seen thousands of completely brilliant ideas on any number of topics scroll across my screen. So I am asking for your help in brainstorming what else we can do. We only have until next Thursday to pull this thing out, we don't have much money (hence the contest), but we have a passion for the project and free time to work with. What can you think of that perhaps no one has thought of before? Is there something obvious that we have missed? Is there something crazy that might be worth a shot? All ideas are most welcome.