The Abundance Project

We will give away gold glittered grant money to passersby in $20 bundles.
Eleven to twelve bundles will be handed out in each quadrant of the city (NE, NW, SE, SW). The event will take place on Awesome Day to commemorate Portland’s awesomeness. Each bundle will have four five dollar bills.
The initial recipients of the bundle will receive instructions to keep five and give away fifteen. They will be asked to invite the recipients of the fifteen to keep five and give away ten. The third recipient will be asked to keep five and give away the final five. Each initial $20 bundle will also come with written instructions and the money portioned out. It will be entirely up to each recipient to do what they please with the money but we forecast a fair amount of people will follow through with giving it away. We will invite recipients to find people to give to whom they don’t know and to have the exchange free of any kind of purchase.

We will film the event and present the video on facebook, youtube, and twitter. We will be transparent with recipients of our intention to spread abundance and enhance the awesomeness of Portland and we will ask permission to film the exchange (we will still give them the money if they decline being filmed). We hope some of the participants will be open to us filming the whole chain reaction.

Although the photos show handwritten instructions for the money exchange, we plan to type out the instructions with an old-fashioned typewriter. On the opposite side of the instructions we will type: ‘The Awesome Project.’ We aim to contact Kboo, Street Roots, the Willamette Weekly, The Skanner, and broadcasted news channels to see if they would like to report our event.

We emphasize the use of cash with this project because it is fading from circulation and its depletion symbolizes the lessening of physical interaction on a grander scale. Reinstating that interaction with free money will connect people with a sense of real abundance.

Funded by Portland, OR (January 2015)