After reviewing our business plan for a couple of weeks, Kelly Crawford of Key Bank passed application on to the bank’s underwriters. We had a hard time getting a sniff from several other banks but Kelly’s focus on women-owned businesses and community development led her to suss out small problems in the plan and help us resolve them to increase our chances of securing a loan. She has been pretty kick ass and has earned herself a blog post in the event our funding comes through next week.

In other news, Amanda and I received a sweet swag bag from Good, the not-for-profit that partnered with Pepsi for the Refresh Everything project. The bag, made by Retroactif out of recycled Pepsi Refresh Everything billboards, was filled with information about the grant, a snazzy certificate, a copy of Good magazine, a gift certificate to Panda Express, vouchers for cases of Pepsi products (can you say vendor drinks for the IHE summer show?), a Pepsi Refresh Everything-branded flash drive and a Flip video camera (!).

(To the victor, the spoils.)

Thanks to some very kind, forward thinking folks our Kickstarter proposal is now 145% funded which means we will be able to direct even MORE money into the hands of local artists and laborers to build out and decorate our store. We are truly humbled by the support we have received thus far.

In other news, Amanda and I will be doing interviews about the Pepsi Refresh Everything project with Indianapolis’ Clear Channel radio stations for their weekly public-service programming, we’ll be featured on the Refresh Everything blog and in the zaniest development yet, on April 9-10 we’ll host a video production crew who will be shooting interviews with us and some of our vendors for spots that will run on MTV, Nick Teen and Hulu.com.