Country Dance and Song Society

Creative Giving: The Wish List

"Creative Giving" is our way of asking if there are things you have, or have access to, that are looking for a new home. We are also interested in your expertise and talents! These are all considered gifts "in kind" to CDSS and are as welcome as your direct financial support of us through membership, participation in programs, and participation in fund raising.

In general our "in kind" needs fall into four categories: programs, technology, acquisitions for the CDSS collections and archives, and expertise. We welcome your assistance in any form: material gifts, monetary gifts in support of a specific item, information about potential sources, and volunteer time.

Recent donations: Thank you!

Bill Tomczak has donated a set of recordings made at Greenfield, MA and other area dances over the years. These will be added to the CDSS collection at UNH.
Ginger Pyron and David Woolf donated time and talents to design and produce our beautiful Membership brochure.
Lisa Greenleaf and Carol Compton have donated morris bells - always a welcome addition to our stock of equipment for camp and year around rentals.
A number of our sales items are offered by authors who donate either product or proceeds to CDSS. Carol Ormand, Joseph Pimental, Gary Roodman and Gail Ticknor have all made recent donations of this kind.

Ongoing Areas of Need

Program needs
Small but important: these are things we would love to have, but can get along without, or that we only need for short periods of time

Do you have spare copies of tune books we could add to our summer program resource "box?"
Can you loan/rent us a wireless microphone for the summer?
Are you in the van or truck rental business and in a position to help us with reasonable cost transport of materials to/from our summer camps? Transport is something we struggle with every year: it is not cost effective for us to own a vehicle, but it is increasingly difficult to find vehicle rentals that work for our schedule.
Are your morris or sword dancing days in the past? Bell pads and rapper swords are in high demand, not only at our camps, but also during the year as schools and communities around the country ask to rent equipment for their own special programs.

Office Technology
Are you, your company, or your school upgrading to newer technology? Our needs are modest: we do not need the fastest, biggest, or most powerful machines, although we do have some minimum system requirements (see below). Can we give your cast-offs a new home? Do you know about specific grants or company "giveaways" designed to aid nonprofits?

To be helpful to us, computers need to be:

PC
Pentium IV or better
Have the capacity for at least 2 Gig memory (need not be installed)
Does not need to have a hard drive - just room for one!
LCD monitors 17" or larger
(Other Peripherals such as keyboards and mice are nice but not necessary)

Library and Archives
Donations to our Library and Archive collections are always welcome. Individual donors have enabled us to build one of the most extensive resource centers for Anglo and Anglo-American dance in existence. Our goals are both to continue building this important collection, and to make sure that such materials are as widely circulated as possible. This may mean adding an item directly to our collections, or finding someone who has an immediate use for it. The kinds of items we look for are: Reference books, song/music books, sheet music, recordings (any format), film footage (any format), original documents of historical interest, photographs (the more you can tell us about them the better!).

Whenever we receive a donation for the archives we check items against the current collection holdings. Items considered related to our stated mission and identified as new to the collection are sent directly to the CDSS Library and Archives.

Items that are duplicates may be:

added to the collections as additional copies;
held at the office for use here;
offered to someone we know has a use for it (especially true of educational materials);
offered to the summer auctions as fund raising items.

You are welcome to request that items not going to the collections be returned to you or disposed of in some other manner.

General Office and Services There are a number of either items or services we could use assistance with in the course of our everyday office work. Can you help?

Do you have high quality photos from camps or other CDSS related events that might appeal to people unfamiliar with what we do? We are always looking for good publicity photos!
Are you ever in the Pioneer Valley with a few hours of free time you could offer? We often need help with a variety of small projects. Come see us in action!

Please contact if you can help in any of these areas. And Thank you!

413-268-7426
FAX: 413-268-7471

Country Dance and Song Society
132 Main St/PO Box 338
Haydenville, MA 01039-0338

Office Hours M-F 9:30am - 5:00pm EST

http://www.cdss.org/