Lakes of Fire: Great Lakes Regional Burn

Launched by the Black Rock Arts Foundation in 2011, the primary purpose of The Burning Man Project is to uphold and manifest the values described in the Ten Principles of Burning Man, specifically: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy.

"Burning Man" is understood not as an event, but as referring to a way of life lived consistently with these Ten Principles. The Burning Man Project provides infrastructural tools and frameworks that will allow people to apply the Ten Principles in many communities and spheres of endeavor.

Mission

The mission of the Burning Man Project is to facilitate and extend the culture that has issued from the Burning Man event into a larger world. This culture forms an integrated pattern of values, experience, and behavior: a coherent and widely applicable way of life. The survival and elaboration of this culture depend upon a cultivated capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations.

Vision

The Burning Man Project will bring experiences to people in grand, awe-inspiring and joyful ways that lift the human spirit, address social problems and inspire a sense of culture, community and cultural engagement.

Project Groups

The Burning Man Project is part of a network of non-profit and volunteer groups working to grow the Burning Man cultural movement by facilitating the spread of the Burning Man ethos globally.

While each of these groups embodies Burning Man’s Ten Principles, each also takes specific aspects of Burning Man’s cultural tenets and manifests them in the world. Art has always been the lifeblood of Burning Man’s culture, and the Black Rock Arts Foundation works to bring civic-minded interactive art to communities around the world. Black Rock Solar’s mission is to gift solar power to underserved communities and educate people about renewable energy, and Burners Without Borders facilitates global volunteerism and civic participation.

It is the Burning Man Project’s intention to both create, collaborate and foster more such organizations, and to establish working relationships with other like-minded groups whose missions are in line with our own.

Black Rock Arts Foundation

The mission of the non-profit Black Rock Arts Foundation (BRAF) is to support and promote community, interactive art and civic participation. Through their three major programs, Grants to Artists, Civic Arts and ScrapEden, BRAF works with communities in the Bay Area and around the world to collaboratively produce innovative, relevant and pioneering works of public art that build community through both their creation and presentation. BRAF is also the Fiscal Sponsor for The Burning Man Project.

Black Rock Solar

Founded in 2007, Black Rock Solar is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization that installs low- or no-cost solar power for institutions in Northern Nevada’s underserved communities, providing its services at the lowest cost possible, relying partly on donations and fundraising efforts. Installations not only provide power for these institutions, they are also used to teach community members about the benefits of renewable energy, how solar systems work, and how they can help address climate change. Its educational program offers job training, professional meetings, and informational workshops in the renewable energy sector.

Burners Without Borders

Burners Without Borders was born in Biloxi, MS during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster relief effort. When the hurricane struck during Burning Man, several groups of volunteers traveled directly from the event to the ravaged area, employing the Burning Man principles of civic responsibility, communal effort, participation, radical self-reliance and gifting, in a coordinated effort to fill in where government relief efforts were failing.

Since then, Burners Without Borders has grown to facilitate volunteerism all over the world for Burners interested in gifting their time and talents to a variety of causes, from disaster relief to community building to beach clean-ups. BWB volunteers have provided assistance in places such as Peru, Haiti, Japan, Alabama and more, while their annual grant program helps would-be volunteers to realize their vision of making a difference in their communities.

The Burning Man Project is a catayst for creative culture in the world. Learn more and get involved at burningmanproject.org