Background!
Peterborough Roller Derby is Peterborough’s original
skater-run roller derby league. In
existence since the early spring of 2011, we are a league made up of women 18
and older from the Peterborough area. We
play several home and away games each season, against teams from all over
Ontario – from Lindsay to Kitchener-Waterloo to Ottawa. All skaters pay to play as part of the
league, and are responsible for helping set up and run bouts, promoting the
league, helping with fundraising ideas and efforts, and participating in
community events such as the Peterborough Pride and Canada Day parades.
The league’s income comes from skater dues and registration
fees and bout ticket sales, and goes to pay for practice space rentals,
insurance, and bout venue rentals – no league members are making any money,
whether through a salary or from bout profits.
The entire league and all of our events are totally volunteer-run.
2013 was a very successful season for PRD, as we saw a
number of new members go from “fresh meat” who were unable to skate before
joining us, to fully qualified bouting skaters.
We ran several successful home bouts at Peterborough’s Kinsmen Arena,
and travelled to take part in several more travel games. This season was something of a transitional
season for us, as we moved from holding our “home games” at arenas outside of
Peterborough to holding them at the Kinsmen.
This move allowed us to begin to grow a hometown fan base, and made our
games much more accessible for potential spectators unable to travel out of
town for a game. Peterborough as a city
definitely has the ability to support a roller derby league, but we need to
build up our audience even more in order to break even on home bouts.
What's the money for?
This campaign is raising money to help the league pay
outstanding rental fees from our 2013 season, and ensure we are eligible to
rent space in town for our 2014 season, keeping us from having to move our home
bouts back to arenas 20 – 30 minutes from Peterborough. Any money we raise above our goal will allow
us to pay off more fees, and save up for next season – so that we can have
money in the bank to put on home bouts, and possibly subsidize the cost of
travel to away bouts for our members.
- We managed to make enough money from dues and ticket sales to cover almost the whole cost of renting our summer space, but due to lower attendance at home bouts than we had hoped, we fell short of the full amount
- The money raised from this campaign is all going straight back into the league - from there we will pay off outstanding rental fees, and save any extra money above what we owe to go towards next summer's rentals.
- If we raise way more than we're hoping for, some of the money may be used to help offset the cost of travel to away bouts for our skaters, or to pay visiting teams to help them offset their travel costs to come play us
What do you get out of this?
First of all, you get to help a local women's sports team continue to hold practices and home bouts in town. This makes roller derby accessible to more members of the Peterborough community, whether they just want to come out and watch, or they want to join us and play!
Besides that satisfaction, we've also put together some pretty great perks for our donors. They range from a thank you mention on our website, to a PRD Cookbook we're putting together just for this, to discounted media sponsorship packages.
- This campaign is valuable to the community because we are one of very few member-run, full-contact sports leagues for women. We take anyone who is interested, even if they've never worn skates before, and teach them everything they need to know about roller derby - how to skate, the rules of the game, and strategy - and get them on the track, playing in bouts with us.
- Roller derby can be a really empowering and life-changing experience for a lot of people - there's a reason people say "roller derby saved my life!" This campaign will let us keep that experience in town.
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Throughout the campaign, we'll post updates to let you know how it's going. These might feature anything from sneak peeks at our skaters' very own recipes for the cookbook, fun facts about roller derby, skater profiles of our members, or just an update on what we did at our most recent practice.
What if I can't donate?
That's totally fine, we understand! There are some other ways you could help us out, though.
- Get the word out! Let your friends, family, and random acquaintances know about our campaign!
- Please use the Indiegogo share tools to do this, and help us spread our message even farther.
Thanks again, from Peterborough Roller Derby
