Friday, March 18, 2005

Non-Profit Budo Academy for kids ?

Just had a chat today with a friend of mine who teaches Western fencing (as well as aikijutsu). After talking about the pain of rent, material, having to find new students to support the serious ones (basically when 2/3rd tourists pay the bill for the 1/3rd serious) I thought about the idea of creating a non-profit to teach kids (disabled and able-body) various budo. My teaching at the rich kids school here is part of that long-term strategy: gathering the proper contacts to eventually raise funds for such a project.

Idea would be to offer 4-5 different budos (serious ones, no gymnastic stuff), and charge a token fee for the kids. We'd need to get help from some kind of organisation like Rotary club or such, that would help provide the building and gather funds to pay the instructors a certain fee. I figure:
- rent: 10,000 / month
- fee for 4 instructors: $200/hr * 2hrs * 2/week * 4 weeks * 4 instructors = $12,800 / month
- repairs, utilities: $2,000/month

Total of roughly $25,000/month ... I gues that means finding someone with fairly deep pockets...

I'll keep thinking about it.