7. History of Crowd-funding
The statue has a long history of being short of funds. When it was built and shipped to the USA in 1886, the pedestal it was going to rest on hadn’t been built. The city hadn’t succeeded in raising the funds required to build one.
Newspaper entrepreneur, Joseph Pulitzer used his paper to campaign for small donations from the populace. A token donation would earn the reader their name in an edition of the paper. In many cases, schoolchildren sent in their lunch pennies to help the effort. The $270,000 required was soon raised and the statue was erected.
A century later, with the statue needing extensive repair, President Reagan appealed to private citizens for donations once more. Everyone, including schoolchildren chipped in again to raise the one million dollars required for Lady Liberty.
Discussion about this post