As creators for One Spark Berlin registered, pins were used to mark their hometowns on a map.
Along with a cluster in the host city, there were pins scattered throughout the European Union.
Stockholm, London and Tuscany, to name a few.
There was even one from 4,900 miles away in Florida, the state where One Spark was born.
“It was wild,” One Spark co-founder Elton Rivas said of seeing the pins sprinkled over the map.
It was something the One Spark team took time to acknowledge.
“A lot of times with the team we’re so focused on our mission, we have to force ourselves to step back every now and then and go, ‘That’s a pretty cool moment,’” Rivas said, a few days before flying out to Germany.
Another of those moments came during a video chat with One Spark Executive Director Joe Sampson, who is in Berlin to prepare for the Friday-Saturday event.
He described to the team in Jacksonville how people were stopping in the street to take pictures as a scaffolding crew was hanging One Spark banners on the building that will host the festival. A building whose German name translates to art hall in English, Rivas said.
It’s a fitting name for a site to host the Jacksonville-born crowdfunding festival with 10 projects in each of the five categories: art, innovation, music, science and technology.
It’s a scaled-down version of the festival whose second year in Jacksonville was spread over five days and featured more than 600 creators throughout Downtown.
Rivas said the smaller-scale festival “just feels right” for Berlin. And it doesn’t drain the resources in Jacksonville, allowing the team to stay focused on building One Spark into a year-round culture.
While the length of the festival and number of creators are substantially smaller than Jacksonville’s One Spark, it still features a huge amount of capital available for the 50 creators — almost $2 million in U.S. dollars, Rivas said.
“That’s hugely significant,” Rivas said.
Reached in Berlin, Sampson said the quality of the ideas and the range of projects are “nothing short of impressive.”
Sampson said the German city hosts “more events every week than I’ve ever seen in any city before.”
Standing out among those events became the organizers’ challenge. Sampson said they went back to basics and hit the streets. They went to meetings, offices, co-working spaces and “talked to people on the sidewalks.”
“When we explain One Spark, there’s typically a moment when they say, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard of anything like that. When is it?” Sampson said.
Rivas said the early success in Jacksonville helped when they talked to Berlin officials and other partners.
“It’s a heck of lot easier when you walk in and say in the first year we had 130,000 and in the second year we more than doubled that,” he said.
The selling worked. The festival is the most popular event on Eventbrite in Germany, the opening ceremony Friday has sold out and the One Spark Berlin hashtag is growing on social media.
There are several strong ties between the two festivals.
The head of One Spark Berlin is Travis Todd, a Jacksonville native and graduate of Jacksonville University.
The 50 creators for Berlin were chosen from 200 registrants by a third-party panel of jurors that included some of the juried winners from Jacksonville.
Several volunteers who helped in Jacksonville decided they wanted to volunteer in Germany.
And the Berlin winners will showcase their work during Jacksonville’s third annual festival in April.
“If you allow yourself to dream, think about where something like that could go,” Rivas said.
“To continue to build Jacksonville, to continue to build what we have on our home turf. That gets me pretty excited, to allow ourselves to dream.”
A dream that Rivas proudly recalled began with scribblings on a napkin.
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