Dragon Con: Where sci-fi, fantasy and philanthropy collide!

This weekend, downtown Atlanta will be taken over by storm troopers, hobbits, cartoon characters and more at the annual Dragon Con convention. And what you may not know is that philanthropy, and the Community Foundation, are a part of it all!

Several years ago, Dragon Con’s founders approached the Community Foundation about starting a donor-advised fund. While Dragon Con has a history of philanthropy, particularly with their annual blood drive that each year has so many donors it effectively eliminates any shortage in our community over Labor Day, they wanted to do more.

Each year at ‘the Con’ they saw the homeless who lived in downtown being taken care of by Con participants and knew they could do better, do more, and they wanted our help. They established the Dragon Con Fund in 2011 as a philanthropic vehicle that would receive a percentage of the proceeds from the Con and act as a way to engage their board and to begin to be more strategic and deliberate about their giving.

Each year before the Con we help the board research a nonprofit to be the ‘featured’ organization. Attendees are asked to make contributions and if they raise $50,000 in donations the founders matche that gift, dollar for dollar, up to $50,000. Dragon Con has resulted in more than $100,000 in donations each year for the last several years to organizations serving our community, like the Atlanta Community Food Bank. They have made philanthropy an integral part of the Con, and this year we helped them select Atlanta Center for Self Sufficiency (ACSS) to be the featured organization. You can learn more about their charitable work here.

The Dragon Con founders are also one of our biggest supporters of Extra Wish, an opportunity catalog our donors use to make small grants to local nonprofits. “We love the Extra Wish program and try to do a couple of grants from every book,” said Sherry Henry. “They tend to be things that we are personally interested in—gardens, animal charities and homeless care providers. We like wishes that will provide something that is needed now, such as picnic tables for a community garden or extra cages for transporting animals.”

So while you’re out enjoying Dragon Con as a participant or as a spectator, remember that philanthropy is woven into the tapestry of the fun and festivities!