Beginning January 13, 2011 and continuing for the next 100 days, Creative Loafing and Creative Tampa Bay invite you to share your ideas for making Tampa Bay a better place to live, work and play.
The 10 best projects will be selected by judges from CL and CTB, reserving one spot for the project that gets the most votes from readers. We'll highlight promising ideas in print and online at The Daily Loaf and The Buzz and name the top 10 on April 7. Finally, on April 14, we'll announce the winner of $1,000 from Creative Tampa Bay.
What kinds of projects are eligible for The 10/100/1000 Challenge?
The range is wide. They can be major endeavors that are already underway, or ideas that are still just glimmerings in someone's imagination. They can be widely admired programs that embrace both sides of the Bay or small-scale efforts that affect a specific neighborhood.
Your project might offer an innovative solution to a social problem or a fresh approach to entrepreneurship — or it might be an arts event or a cultural start-up.
The key word is "creative" — which, granted, is not exactly a surprise given the sponsors. Creative Tampa Bay is a non-profit organization known for promoting the latest thinking on the area's creative economy, from talks by urban theorists like Richard Florida and Joe Cortright to in-depth studies like 2006's "Things Are Different Here." And here at Creative Loafing we have a long tradition of highlighting the best and the brightest in Tampa Bay, whether in our day-to-day coverage or in special issues like The Best of the Bay and The Green 100.
And now we've joined together for 10/100/1000. The challenge was inspired by a similar initiative in Worcester, MA, which Creative Tampa Bay's Peter Kageyama seized upon as an excellent means of promoting the kind of innovation the Tampa Bay region needs.
Bottom line: We're hoping you can help us identify and reward projects that are cool, important, game-changing and ultimately sustaining to the region.
You'll find application forms at cltampa.com/ten100, where you'll be asked for a description of your project in 250 words or less. Let us know what the project has accomplished or what you attend it to accomplish, why it will make Tampa Bay a better place to live and why winning the challenge would help. You'll also be asked to assign it to a category from the following: Arts & Culture; Communication; Education & Youth; Environment; Food & Nutrition; Housing; Jobs; Neighborhoods; Transportation; Other. And you'll be able to upload artwork or photos.
Below is one example of a hypothetical project entry. Please note that this is not an actual application. We simply chose to highlight Pecha Kucha because it gets good ideas percolating in Tampa Bay's most creative minds — which is just what we hope to do with 10/100/100.
