Letters... oh we get letters...

First of all, thanks to everyone who jumped in on the first weekend to make donations to the 'Dream Ride' fundraiser for the Efrat Emergency Medical Center Radiology Center.  We are past past our first $1000!
 
But apparently some of you still have questions you need answered before you'll feel comfortable tossing something into the hat... so here are my response to some of your questions received to date:
 
Q:  Why are you doing this?  Why not just ask for donations?  It's not like we'd demand our donations back if you decide not to do the whole 1000 mile ride, right?
 
A:  Good point.  The truth is that the idea of the ride occurred to me first... and the fundraiser was a way to give the ride the kiss of legitimacy.  The ride is now scheduled to be the culmination of the fundraising effort, and will mark the end of this particular campaign.  Like most things... people are easier to move towards action when they have both a deadline and a point to focus on.  The deadline for meeting the goal is the date of my ride... and the ride itself is the focus (although not the recipient) of the campaign.
 
Q:  What do you get out of this?
 
A:  Not much.  Yes, I'll hopefully get a nice certificate saying I rode 1000 miles in less than 24 hours (a feat whose bragging rights are of value to a truly minuscule portion of the population).  But I'll also have the satisfaction of having pulled together a bunch of good people and focused their generosity on a truly deserving project.  In life, we very rarely get to identify a real problem... figure out an achievable solution... and actually fix it.  Being able to share that feeling with a big group of like-minded people is the cherry on the whipped cream!

Q:  How much of the money raised actually goes to the Radiology Center?
 
A:  100%.  Okay, there is a truly minuscule processing fee that is charged by the donation server we use... but even that was selected to make sure that the maximum possible amount of each donation ends up benefiting the project.  No management fees, overhead costs, salaries, commissions, administrative fees, etc. are taken out.  Everything donated is going to be used for the completion of the Radiology Center.

Q:  Will people donating money get their name on a plaque?  Will you?
 
A:  To be clear, I get nothing from this... not even gas money for the ride.  If they do decide to put up any kind of marker in the Radiology Center to mark the campaign's contribution (and I doubt they will)... I will ask that it honor 'The Readers of Treppenwitz'.   That's the thing about being a worker bee... we get the satisfaction of an important job well done, but the credit gets spread around.  :-)
 
Q:  What is the campaign goal?
 
A:  I am reluctant to give that away just yet.  There is a great passage from Randy Pausch's famous 'Last Lecture' (http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/Randy/pauschlastlecturetranscript.pdf)   where he described giving the first class of a new course what he thought was a difficult assignment... and they shocked him with the results.  So he asked his mentor how to respond:

"...I just gave a two-week assignment, and they came back and did stuff that if I had given them a whole semester I would have given them all As. ..., Sensei, what do I do? [laughter] And Andy thought for a minute and he said, you go back into class tomorrow and you look them in the eye and you say, “Guys, that was pretty good, but I know you can do better.”

I know approximately how much the Radiology Center needs to open its doors.  But I'm afraid that if I tell you a number now, we won't really find out what we're capable of. There are always extras on the wish list that they could do without.  But if we can raise enough for the extras too... why not?!  As we get close to the date of the ride I'll let you know what the real goal is.  Okay?