Company attributes
Other attributes
Burning Man is a nonprofit organization providing the infrastructure of Black Rock City and works to globalize the Burning Man culture and promote the nonprofit's 10 principles to life. Burning Man created a global network of communities that produce about ninety official Burning Man events and develops a range of initiatives that are based on the 10 Principles.
The Burning Man Project connects an ecosystem of creatives and community leaders through grants, education, training initiatives, and art and civic engagement programs, such as Burners Without Borders and the Fly Ranch Project. The platform's network of people works to build Black Rock City, the location of the annual Burning Man gathering.
The hub of this global network is the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Burning Man Project, which is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The Mission Statement of the Burning Man Project is to facilitate and extend the culture that has been issued from the Burning Man event into the larger world. Burning Man's vision is to bring experiences to people in ways that lift the human spirit, address social problems, and inspire a sense of culture, community, and civic engagement.
Through six linked program areas, Burning Man provides infrastructural tools and frameworks to support local communities in applying the 10 Principles. These interconnected program areas include arts, civic involvement, culture, education, philosophical center, and social enterprise.
In 2004, Burning Man's cofounder, Larry Harvey, wrote the 10 Principles as guidelines for the Regional Network. They were created not to dictate how people should act but as a reflection of the community’s ethos and culture as it had developed since the event’s inception. The 10 Principles are (as written by Larry Harvey):
- Radical Inclusion: Anyone can be included in Burning Man. The stranger is welcomed and respected, and no prerequisites exist for participation in the community.
- Gifting: Burning Man is devoted to acts of unconditional gift-giving which do not contemplate a return or an exchange for something of equal value.
- Decommodification: To preserve the spirit of gifting, the community seeks to develop social environments unmediated by commercial sponsorships, transactions, or advertising. The culture is protected from exploitation, and resists the substitution of consumption for participatory experience.
- Radical Self-reliance: The encouragement of the individual to discover, exercise and rely on their inner resources.
- Radical Self-expression: Radical self-expression comes from individual uniqueness and can only be determined by the individual or a collaborating group. It is offered as a gift to others, and the giver is expected to respect the rights and liberties of the recipient.
- Communal Effort: The community values creative cooperation and collaboration, and strives to create, promote and protect social networks, public spaces, works of art, and methods of communication that support these interactions.
- Civic Responsibility: Burning Man values civil society. Community event organizers are required to assume responsibility for public welfare and communicate civic responsibilities to participants. They also assume responsibility for conducting events according to local, state and federal laws.
- Leaving No Trace: The community is committed to leaving no physical trace of their activities wherever they gather. They clean up after themselves and endeavor, whenever possible, to leave venues in a better state than when they located them.
- Participation: The community is committed to a radically participatory ethic through the belief that individual or societal transformative change occurs via the medium of deeply personal participation. Burning Man achieves being through doing, and makes the world real via actions that open the heart. Everyone is invited to work and play.
- Immediacy: Immediate experience is regarded as the most crucial touchstone of value in the Burning Man culture. They strive to overcome barriers to the recognition of the inner selves of individuals, the reality of people around them, participation in society, and contact with a natural world beyond human powers.
The Burning Man Project supports local communities with infrastructural tools and frameworks, in applying the Ten Principles via six interconnected program areas. In 2011, these program areas were developed by the six founders of Burning Man and their nonprofit and legal advisors, who were developing the long-term vision for the nonprofit, which became the Burning Man Project. They are not distinct, independently operating programs. They are aspirational and represent ongoing and future plans, often related to Burning Man’s 100-year plan.
Activities in the burning man art program include the facilitation of creative self-expression, through the encouragment of individuals to integrate art with daily personal and public life in interactive and collaborative ways. It promotes social architecture, and provides opportunities for people to create and display mobile and wearable art like art cars, bikes, and clothing. The project accomplishes this through art grants, exhibitions, festivals, public art placement, directories and catalogues of art and artists who work in this genre, and other means.
The Civic Engagement Program's Activities include organizing community celebrations, parades, festivals, and other events via a network in urban and rural areas, as well as the virtual world. In creating these events, Burning Man Project encourages broad participation and engagement with city, state, and federal agencies to permit the display of public art and creative self-expression.
Urban Cultural Centers will assist with the development of cultural districts and will seek to provide vital services and required amenities in low-and moderate-income neighborhoods, contributing to neighborhood economic self-sufficiency. Burning Man Project’s rural activities will contribute to economically blighted areas of Northern Nevada and elsewhere via art and civic engagement projects. The Project will expand the nascent Digital Playa and virtual “Burn” events.
Burning Man Project’s Culture Centers Program will create and operate urban and rural cultural centers and spaces that encourage and showcase collaborative and interactive arts, culture, and community participation. These Cultural Centers may be permanent or temporary, physical or virtual.
Activities include the establishment of an Urban Cultural Center in San Francisco, which will offer collaborative gathering and gallery spaces, classrooms, workshops, a library, archives, sites for ritual and ceremony, shared office space for multiple community-based nonprofit organizations, and eventually a café and “museum” store.
In the longer-term future, rural retreat centers, artist colonies, and camping sites may offer opportunities to create interactive, collaborative community and culture in natural settings. This program will find, evaluate, purchase, manage, operate, and maintain all Project facilities, sites, networks, and real estate, which will be developed and operated using technologies and renewable energy.
The aim of this program is to teach the philosophy, principles, and practice of Burning Man culture and experience worldwide. Activities in this program include the provision of classes, skills training sessions, workshops, lectures, conferences, seminars, coaching, mentoring and certification programs through different educational modalities. These include in-person, online, peer-to-peer, and interactive, experiential and service-learning programs.
Certifications may be offered in subjects like dispute resolution and leadership training. Topics will include the different ways that the 10 Principles apply to different fields of endeavor, from the philosophical to the practical. Skills training may include project management and fundraising; the creation of interactive art, flame effects, costumes; and guidance on how to recruit and retain volunteers, facilitate town meetings, engage with government agencies, write art grants, set up a nonprofit, produce an event, and install public art.
Burning Man Project may also teach collaborative communication, active listening, emergency management, dispute resolution, collaborative leadership, disaster preparedness and relief, and other topics. The staff, consultants, and volunteer teachers—professionals and experts—will come from the Burning Man community and beyond to create impromptu sessions and formal classes.
The Philosophical Center will act as a think tank for scholarly research and the preparation and publishing of materials explaining the Ten Principles, including how they have been and can be practically implemented in different fields of human endeavor.
Activities in this program will offer scholarly and literary exploration and content for The Project, Burning Man culture, and the general public, emphasizing cross-disciplinary thinking, interactivity, and collaborative action. The Center will conduct research and promote innovation in art, science, play, gifting, collaboration, and other related economic and policy issues.
It will explore and publish conceptual, academic, and first-person accounts describing how the ethos of the Ten Principles applies to different human endeavors. The publications will be in different forms and media like articles, books, videos, films, case studies, “how-to” manuals, policies, procedures, streaming media, and other means.
Burning Man Project’s Social Enterprise Program will collaborate with mission-allied organizations and projects by offering certifications, social and connective networks, fiscal sponsorship, shared support services, and mentoring. Activities of this program may include education, coaching, and certifications for organizations and businesses that embody the Ten Principles, and establishing a public interest “Burner Business Bureau” that informs consumers about responsible, ethical, community, and culture-oriented ventures.
Closely mission-allied fiscally sponsored projects and 501(c)(3) nonprofits may subscribe to get shared support services from Burning Man Project in human resources, volunteer coordination, bookkeeping, financial management, technology support, international operations, nonprofit governance, risk management, emergency response, legal compliance, and other areas of Burning Man Project’s subject matter expertise.
