CoFundEdu: A New Crowdfunding Service For Librarians

Need financial help getting to a library conference?
Say hello to CoFundEdu. This founder and developer of Cofundedu Nadaleen Tempelman-Kluit sent the following introduction along.

CoFundEdu.com, a web site dedicated to help librarians participate in professional development proved successful and helped Michael Schor, a public Librarian from Arizona attend American Library Association (ALA) 2013. Michael was unable to attend due to lack of funding.
Using CoFundEdu.com (think Co-Fund-Education) for only 15 days, Michael was able to “crowdsource” 50% of his goal while receiving the rest of the funding he needed from Cofundedu.com sponsor matches.
“I’m just so excited to be at ALA this year and that there was such an outpouring of support for this new project,” Michael stated. “If you are a library staff member who wants to get to a conference but you or your library don’t have the funds, start a campaign!”
CoFundEdu.com was started by Nadaleen Tempelman-Kluit, Discovery & Digital Access Librarian at New York University Libraries. While attending the ALA Library Information Technology Association (LITA) All Committee meeting at Midwinter, Nadaleen was dismayed by how few fellow committee members were in attendance due to lack of funding. Reaching out to generous sponsors, including EBSCO, Credo, EasyBib, Data-Planet, Third Iron, and Elsevier, she created CoFundEdu.com, and the rest is history.
“There will always be a need to help our community find funding for professional development, including conferences and training,” said Nadaleen. “The profession faces more and more commercial competition and constant technological advanced. These challenges, coupled with decreasing budgets, require us to capitalize on opportunities to collaborate and innovate. There is no better way to do so than at conferences and other professional development opportunities, and no better way to raise funding that with CoFundEdu.com.”

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, EBSCO, Elsevier, Funding, Libraries, News