A Perfect Moment | Nirvan Mullick

Interview by Erin Castellino. Photography by Jessica Isaac

A PERFECT MOMENT

The cleverly designed spaces by HARLEY CROSS in their sprawling shared Downtown loft serve as the backdrop to a fascinating conversation with Filmmaker and Activist, NIRVAN MULLICK.

Serendipity is a notion that Nirvan Mullick can appreciate, since a perfect moment was instrumental in altering the course of his life. A struggling filmmaker, he found himself among the used auto shops in Boyle Heights looking for a replacement door handle for his 1996 Corolla. Instead, he found a 9-year-old boy and an amusement arcade made entirely from discarded cardboard boxes. The result was Nirvan’s immensely popular short film, ‘Caine’s Arcade’, and a global movement to unleash children’s imaginations through creative play.

LA HOME’s, Erin Castellino, visited Nirvan Mullick at his home in Downtown LA to discuss ‘Caine’s Arcade’ and his work since then.

Erin: Tell me how you landed here, sharing this loft space with Harley Cross. Nirvan: In 2004, I was living Downtown and working on an art film project called ‘The 1 Second Film’, selling $1 Producer credits on the streets. It was an early experiment in crowdfunding. Harley had a business called Hint Mints and he had bought this building to be the mint warehouse, originally thinking he would live upstairs and run the business downstairs. However, the mint smell was so strong that he couldn’t live here. Buildings were cheap at that time so he bought another building with his partner and made this one his living space. He lived upstairs and the downstairs kind of became a forgotten land of storage.

By happenstance, I had sold a $10 Producer credit to Harley’s business partner, Cooper Bates. Cooper followed what I was doing online as I started to get celebrities like Kevin Bacon, Spike Jonze, and Stephen Colbert to become Producers. Cooper thought it was interesting, and reached out with an offer; he told me that if I could get A-list celebrities to sign their mint tins, Hint Mints would donate up to $500 towards producing The ‘1 Second Film’. So I started carrying their mints with me and I got people like Benicio Del Toro, George Clooney and Cate Blanchett to sign the tins. I first met Harley in his Hint Mint office, where I laid out all the tins that I’d gotten signed, and we haggled over the value of the different celebrity autographs. I got $500 for Clooney, but only $50 for Kid Rock, which in retrospect was generous.

Harley and I were neighbors and gradually became best friends. When my cat passed, I couldn’t bury her at my place, so Harley offered his backyard. Behind Harley’s building is an alley where trains used to run, and I buried my cat next to the train tracks and underneath a jacaranda tree. A few years later, I moved into the downstairs of Harley’s building. I ran water to the back and built a little garden, in a way to make a memorial garden for my cat, but also because I don’t think I could have stayed Downtown much longer if I couldn’t have some kind of green space. I’ve now been downtown in the Arts District for over 15 years. Everything upstairs is Harley, except for a few games I’ve added, and the downstairs is something we’ve slowly fixed up together. We also started a creative agency together called Interconnected, which produced “Caine’s Arcade”, and we co-founded the non-profit Imagination.org that grew from the film, which we ran out of this loft in the early days.

Erin: You are currently juggling three projects. I’d love to talk about Caine’s Arcade first. Nirvan: It was the last day of summer in 2011. I was driving a ‘96 Corolla and the door handle had broken, so I went over to Boyle Heights where there’s an area of used auto part shops. A store caught my eye because it had a swing set hanging from the tree on the sidewalk. When I went in, I met this 9-year-old boy surrounded by cardboard boxes that formed an arcade he had built. He asked if I wanted to play, and told me that for a dollar I could get four turns, or for two dollars I’d get a ‘Fun Pass’ and 500 turns. I bought the Fun Pass and ended up staying for an hour playing this

kid’s games. They were just incredible, all made out of pure imagination and discarded auto part boxes, with his old toy matchbox cars for prizes. When I’d score a point, he’d crawl into the box and push out little prize tickets through a slot. I was just amazed and asked him what his arcade was called, and that’s when he turned around and showed me the back of his shirt which said ‘Caine’s Arcade’. On the front of his shirt was written ‘Staff ’. He’d made his own T-shirt! Before I went home, he wrote me a receipt for four-hundred and sixty more turns, because I hadn’t used them all, and he wanted me to come back.

It was one of those unexpected moments. Suddenly, in the middle of a junkyard, I found a magical world of imagination and was transported to my childhood memories. It made me feel like a 9-year-old kid again and reminded me why I started making things. I was at a place where I was getting pretty far away from that. I realized I was working too hard on something that wasn’t happening organically. If I put it aside and changed my tactics, I could re-approach it with better health and a better frame of mind.

I went back to Caine’s Arcade and asked Caine’s dad if I could make a short film about his son’s arcade. That’s when I learned that I had been his son’s first and only customer. His dad had been bringing Caine to work with him every day, all summer, and Caine had been asking all his father’s customers to play but nobody had stopped to buy a Fun Pass. When his dad told me that, it broke my heart. So we decided, as part of the film, to organize a surprise flashmob of customers and make Caine’s day. On October 2nd of 2011, over a hundred people showed up, chanting ‘We came to play!’

Caine’s face lit up with the best smile ever when he saw that crowd. He thought he was dreaming at first. I asked him how he felt when people came to play, and when he said he felt proud, my heart-stopped. As a filmmaker, it’s a feeling you hope for but can’t expect. It took six more months to finish editing. When I finally posted it, April 9, 2012, I set a goal of raising a twenty-five thousand dollar scholarship fund for Caine. The film got over a million views the first day, trended worldwide on Twitter with people like Justin Timberlake tweeting about it, and we ended up raising over two hundred and forty thousand dollars for Caine’s scholarship fund.

Within days, I received tens-of-thousands of e-mails from parents and teachers around the world, sharing pictures of their kids who had been inspired by Caine’s Arcade to make their own cardboard games. That was not something I had anticipated. Parents and educators were asking me to help foster their kids’ creativity, just as we had for Caine. Sensing there might be an opportunity to turn that moment into a movement that could have more impact, we decided to launch a non-profit. 5 days after the film went viral, the first Saturday Caine’s Arcade was open, the Goldhirsh Foundation gave us a $250,000 grant and Harley and I started Imagination.org.

That first Saturday after the film went viral was magical. Over a thousand people turned up to play Caine’s Arcade, and there was a five and a halfhour line, stretching around four city blocks, of people waiting to play Caine’s cardboard games. My sister and my dad showed up to surprise me, and my dad was standing next to me when the Goldhirsh Foundation gave us the $250,000 grant. It was the day that my life turned a corner.

Nirvan’s bedroom space is dominated by a steel arch at the bedhead. The arch was added to the original warehouse as part of earthquake retrofitting.

Nirvan’s studio and office space. The factory window was acquired from the original brick wall, which had to be sealed for earthquake retrofitting, and was converted into a book shelf.

Caine had told his dad after we did the flash mob for him, that it was the best day of his life. And that Saturday after the film went viral ended up being the best day of mine. There were full-grown men in tears, who had brought their entire family to play. It wasn’t just me that Caine’s Arcade brought back to childhood. It was universal. I think that was the first time I’ve ever made anything that touched people on an emotional level, at that scale. It was incredibly powerful.

My dad had a sudden heart attack three months later and passed away – it was a total shock. That Saturday at Caine’s Arcade turned out to be the last day I spent with my dad. Looking back, I’m incredibly grateful we got to share that day. My dad was from India, where my sister and I were also born, and he had immigrated to the US to get his Masters in Engineering. He raised my sister and I as a single father. However, unlike every other Indian parent I knew, he didn’t push us to be an engineer like him, or a doctor or a computer programmer. Instead, he let us make mistakes and follow our curiosity. I went on to Cal Arts to study Experimental Animation, after studying Philosophy at New College. Two incredibly ‘impractical’ degrees – especially to an Indian dad with three Masters in Engineering. But when my dad saw that line of people at Caine’s Arcade and saw doors begin to open for me, I could tell that he was proud, and knew I was going to be ok.

The story of Caine’s Arcade has been a life-changing experience for me. It’s been such a joy to be able to share this story with other people and to see how its impact has grown beyond anything I could have imagined. After starting Imagination.org, we made a follow-up story, ‘Caine’s Arcade Part 2’, to launch our first program, the Global Cardboard Challenge. 11,000 kids took part that first year and our #CardboardChallenge has now become a popular program that schools do year-round. We’ve since had over one million kids in 80 countries take part, and Imagination.org continues to grow.

Erin: And that’s just from one person saying ‘yes’ to someone. Maybe we all need to slow down and take notice of things that might easily pass us by? Nirvan: On the speaking circuit that’s something I talk about a lot – how it’s often these small moments that can have the biggest impact. If you think about the most powerful thing we know, in terms of energy, it’s splitting the atom. It is an incredibly small thing, but there’s just this tremendous relationship between big energy and very small things.

I’ve been chasing this idea of crafting perfect moments for 25 years. It’s one of the themes that I think runs through a lot of my projects. On the surface, our Rick Doblin film is about the legalization of psychedelics and MDMA for therapeutic use. The transformation of mental health care, how to take on a large scale social justice issue and spend your whole life making it – but for me, it’s really the story of a young person, Rick, who stumbled onto his calling – the alignment where your creativity or your intentions start walking in sync with what you’re doing in the world. Rick is somebody who’s been walking on that path for longer than most. Almost 50 years, he’s been in perfect step with what he’s meant to do. He’s one of the happiest people I’ve ever met. He lives in a modest home with his family. He travels a lot and gives up a lot of that time to do this work that he’s dedicated to. But for me, this story, and why we’re following him for 8 years, is to see that moment when MDMA becomes a legal prescription drug, after which Rick will retire to become the Psychedelic Psychotherapist that he’s dreamt of being since he was 18. And that, I imagine, will be a perfect moment.

In another documentary I’m working on, a guy named Larry Walters spent 25 years dreaming of flying by attaching a cluster of heliumfilled weather balloons to a lawn chair, and in 1982 he finally did it. That’s a perfect moment. He went up 16,500ft and didn’t take a single photograph when he was up there, even though he had a camera. The ‘1 Second Film’ began as an idea to create a perfect moment by spending a lifetime creating one-second of film as perfectly as possible, it led me to friends like Harley. And Caine’s Arcade was about creating a perfect moment for a perfect stranger, which is an idea that I’d written down and carried with me over 25 years ago. Suddenly, there was a chance to do it. In terms of recognizing those little moments, it can be helpful to first think of what it is you’re looking for. There are these little ideas that are all around us all the time, and it’s just when we’re in the right place to receive them that the connection is going to happen and create something that can be transformative.

Erin: I do think that there’s a kind of a modern-day term going around about being a bridge, and I see you being a bridge to people taking more notice of these moments. It’s like creating an art project with many layers, and you may or may not know what it looks like at the end. Ultimately, it’s that gift to the world that says OK, this can handle itself now. Nirvan: When I come across an unusual idea I feel a bit of a responsibility to take care of it and see it through. We were incredibly lucky to have the Goldhirsh Foundation invest in the potential of this story quickly, which allowed it to grow and have more impact. You know, there are a lot of magical stories that happen. We’re not filming them all, but more often people are. It’s becoming more accessible to capture things. It’s a real gift to stumble onto a story that has magic in it like this, and I want to do everything I can to take care of it. I hope that if we do, it will help make it possible for more of these kinds of ideas to get funding and happen. Ben Goldhirsh and the Goldhirsh Foundation took a big chance on us at a critical time. Seven years later, thanks to that initial support, Imagination.org has grown. And this year we received a one million dollar grant from Vans in partnership with Vans Checkerboard Day, to grow our programs and foster creative expression even more.

Erin: Wow, that’s incredible! So, there are three film projects that you are working on right now... Nirvan: Yes, I already mentioned two of them - “Prescription X” is the story of Rick Doblin, and his lifelong work with MAPS.org to legalize psychedelics for therapeutic use, starting with MDMA to treat PTSD. Another is the story of Larry Walters, who tied 42 helium-filled weather balloons to his lawn chair in 1982 and flew over 16,000 ft above Los Angeles – which is an incredible story, though the end is very tragic, as Larry committed suicide 11 years after his flight. I’ve been working on this documentary film about Larry for the past 5 years and started researching it 15 years ago. I thought this would be the year I finally finish it and had set aside time and funds to finish it. But then last November the deadliest wildfire in California happened. And I decided to put the Larry project aside and started to work on a third project called ‘Climate Uprising’ to talk about the link between these wildfires and the climate crisis.

Erin: Can you tell us more about the ‘Climate Uprising’ project? Nirvan: I think story-telling can help communicate the emotional stakes of the climate crisis. For background, after Caine’s Arcade, I got to direct the #EarthToParis campaign for the U.N. Foundation, which was their digital campaign leading up to the COP 21 Paris Climate Agreement. I made a series of videos to help bring the voices of people around the world to world leaders, calling on the leaders to make bold commitments to combat climate change. So now, to be the only country (under Trump) that has pulled out of this agreement, was already deeply upsetting.

In November, when the Camp Fire was burning down Paradise, the role of climate change was very much on my mind. Warming temperatures are making these wildfires more frequent and ferocious. At the same time, the Camp Fire was burning Paradise, the Woolsey Fire was burning down here in Los Angeles. My sister had to evacuate her place in Topanga, and I have several friends who lost homes, and two people died. This is a story that impacts all of us, and what happened in Paradise should be a wake-up call.

That’s why I was really angry when I saw a video of Trump visiting the ruins of Paradise, after eighty-six people had been killed and fifty-two thousand displaced – where he continued to deny that climate change is real. He didn’t even know the name of the town, repeatedly calling it “Pleasure,” and suggested we simply “rake our forests” to prevent these disasters. I was so angry, I shared that video of Trump on Facebook, and from that, some friends and I decided to crowdfund a trip to send some Camp Fire survivors on a trip to DC to meet with elected officials and share their stories and connect the dots to the climate crisis.

The Climate Uprising project started with this crowdfunded trip, quickly organized. I started to find Camp Fire survivors with powerful stories to share. The fire had moved at 80 football fields a minute, and many of the 86 people who died burned in their cars trying to escape. I met three nurses from Feather River Hospital who, after evacuating all their 67 patients in under an hour, were themselves trapped in a police car when trying to escape. Their car became surrounded by flames and a flaming car blocked the road ahead, with downed power poles behind them. They got out and tried to push the flaming car out of their way, but couldn’t, and when they tried to start their car again, there wasn’t enough oxygen for the engine to start. Trapped with no place to go, they all made phone calls to their loved ones and said goodbye. Then they got out of the car and started walking up a flaming hill, their clothes catching fire, their hair singed, one of them broke her foot. The police officer turned on his body-cam to film what he thought would be the last moments of their lives. Then, miraculously, a bulldozer appeared out of the smoke. It pushed away the burning debris and everybody was rescued. This was all captured on the body cam. These nurses volunteered to go on this trip to D.C. to share their stories, just a few weeks after the fire.

While organizing this trip, I also met a woman named Audrey Denney. What a lot of people don’t know about the Camp Fire is that it happened just 2 days before the midterm election, when Audrey Denney lost her race to a four-term climate denier Congressman Doug LaMalfa in the conservative California District 1. Audrey had no time to process the loss of her election, jumping immediately into fire relief work. She then volunteered to join this trip to DC to help the Camp Fire survivors navigate DC.

The trip showed the power of a story, told by the right people at the right moment, to open doors. In a few days, we were able to set back-to-back meetings for this group to meet with elected leaders like

Opposite Left: Vintage clocks adorn the walls of this contemplative space, which looks out onto the back garden.

Right: A 1950s Aljoa Sportsman Travel Trailer, which serves as a guest room to visiting artists, friends, and weary travelers.

“I feel that ideas have an inherent sense of what they want to become and that you have to choose your ideas very carefully because they become like a marriage. They can lead to a lifelong relationship.”

Nancy Pelosi and Bernie Sanders, as well as environmental leaders like Bill McKibben and the founder of the Sunrise Movement. Bernie ended up sharing the nurse’s story on his social media and also on the Tonight Show when Colbert asked him about the climate crisis. The Camp Fire survivors that went to DC also invited Bernie and the Sunrise Movement to come back to Paradise to have Climate Town Halls, which they both did, bringing even more press to allow more Camp Fire survivors to share their stories and talk about solving the climate crisis.

During the trip to DC, Audrey Denney told me she was going to run again in 2020 against LaMalfa, and so I decided to make a film following her and the community’s efforts to call for climate action in the 2020 election. We started #ClimateUprising to help the community connect their stories.

I had to put my Lawnchair Balloon project aside to work on Climate Uprising. So it is a bit of a juggling act. I love Larry’s story, but my thought was – what is the point of making a whimsical story about flying in a lawn chair if we won’t have a habitable planet in a few decades? The scientists are telling us that if we don’t address the climate crisis in the next 10 to 12 years, it will be too late. I think we all have to do whatever we can right now. ClimateUprising.org is still a small grassroots project, but we are hoping to grow it into a story-driven platform for climate action while making this documentary. The 2020 election will be critical to elect leaders who understand that climate science is real, and I hope that telling this story can help.

Erin: Did you ever think that you’d be in this place, tackling the climate change issue? Nirvan: When I was a kid in grade school, I was in a program called Future Problem Solving, where we would be given a brief of some faroff problem and be tasked with brainstorming solutions. I remember one of them was global warming. That was over 30 years ago. And now we’re the adults that have to do something. We’re the last generation that has a chance to solve this crisis before its irreversible. I have always been interested in the intersection between storytelling and social impact, so whenever possible, I look for ways to do that with the stories I tell. Caine’s Arcade began by seeing what we could do for one kid. Then we got a chance to impact more kids. Shifting to climate, I was friends with the folks who started GOOD, and after Caine’s Arcade went viral, I mentioned to them that I wanted to get more involved with the climate crisis. They were working on the #EarthToParis U.N. Foundation campaign and asked me to direct it for them. I did another video featuring Jack Black and Lil Bub for COP22 in Marrakech a year later. And I just got to make a short film about the historic youth-led global climate strikes on September 21st, which played in the UN to world leaders at the General Assembly directly before Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You” speech. So I’ve been very lucky to get a chance to make projects for issues I care about.

It’s something we can all choose to get involved with, at any level. I’m really inspired by local community organizing. There is a group of folks in Malibu who organized after the Woolsey fire, led by Trevor Neilson and his wife, Evilin, who also recently announced a Climate Emergency Fund. Several philanthropists are now contributing to this fund to help frontline climate activists, like Extinction Rebellion. I think a lot of us are having this wake-up call moment. Seeing these devastating climatefueled disasters from flooding to wildfires happening more frequently. We’ve continued doing grassroots organizing with Camp Fire survivors, in collaboration with other climate groups like Sunrise and 350.org, and we’re hoping ClimateUprising.org can help to tell the stories that connect the dots and share some of the emotion. I learned in Caine’s Arcade the power of communicating a feeling. People often won’t remember what you say, but they will remember how it makes them feel. If collectively, the world could truly feel what is at stake with the climate crisis and mass extinction, we would act.

Erin: How do you keep a balance? Do you have more whimsical projects, or are you focused only on making a difference? Nirvan: I just follow my curiosity and intuition. Caine’s Arcade didn’t start as a social impact film. It was pretty whimsical. And then there’s the Rick Doblin story. Rick is super whimsical, as is the world of psychedelic science. It’s fascinating and full of colorful characters. And I think my lawnchair balloon movie has a lot of whimsy in it as well. That said, I’m prioritizing this climate project right now because it feels like a timely story and the most important thing I can be working on. But it is a pretty heavy topic, so I do try to keep whimsy in my life in other ways.

Erin: I guess, maybe personal practices that you do so you are not incredibly exhausted all the time? Nirvan: I have a personal practice of keeping track of one perfect moment from my day. I’ve got two artist friends – Greta Morgan, a musician, and Bianca Giaever, who makes radio stories and films – and the three of us text each other one perfect moment from our day. You know it can be a very small thing and doesn’t necessarily have to be perfectly good, it can be perfectly awkward, perfectly horrible. It’s been a fun practice and we’ve been doing it for almost two years now.

A gum-ball machine filled with encapsulated dandelion wishes, made by Nirvan to promote his animated short film, “The Three of Us”, at film festivals.

A Sea Dragon and Figurine sculpture made by deaf, blind, and mute artist, Chris Cook, who creates figures by feel from his dreams and books he has read in braille.

Opposite: Some adornments designed by Nirvan. A Cardboard Top Hat, a Dandelion Helmet, and a Fish Eye Guy mask with mirrors that allow you to see in two opposite directions simultaneously.

Erin: It could be interesting to make that a journal, screenshot those messages and make it a publication. I imagine that it’s hard to not make everything a project. Nirvan: It could be! But, yes, it’s nice to have simple little things that aren’t a big project, and personal things that aren’t meant to share. I like to go out in the woods and whittle tiny little spoons and other little things. I garden. I play soccer. I’m doing a little watercolor for my friend Gideon Irving’s album – and dinners and cooking, and you know this loft space is always bustling and great for large potlucks. I’ve got a lot of quirky, whimsical people in my life. We’ve got a friend Alice who’s kind of an artist in residence here, working on her album. We have a community that feels like chosen family. And Harley has 14 couches for them to crash on.

And whenever I travel for my projects, I try to bookend a little downtime. Some of the most important times in documentary filmmaking happen when the camera is not on. The relationships that you’re building. The trust you’re working to earn. That’s another way that “Caine’s Arcade” has been helpful. It’s something I can point to and say this is not only something we made, but then also something we took care of after we made it. I ended up working on Imagination.org full-time for a year and a half after making “Caine’s Arcade”, getting the non-profit off the ground. Now, we have a great ED and staff running it, and I’m able to just be a board member, help fundraise and work on my other projects.

Erin: What’s happening with Caine? Nirvan: Caine is now 17! He’s a senior in high school, driving a car, and doing well in school. He is a Junior Board Member for our nonprofit foundation, which merged with Two Bit Circus Foundation last year. Every Friday, Caine comes into Two Bit Circus and works for a few hours. He’s getting mentorship from some of the game designers there, learning how to code, solder, and program. And he’s also continuing to inspire the next generation of makers and kids.

Erin: Tell me about Imagination.org and how people can help. Nirvan: Imagination.org is the nonprofit that grew out of Caine’s Arcade. It wasn’t something we had in mind when making the film but grew organically from the viral response. Fostering creativity is so important. 65% of kids in school today will end up having jobs in careers that don’t yet exist, so creativity will be the number one skill they need to be successful. But our schools often kill creativity, and studies show creativity has been declining since the ‘90s. So we started Imagination. org to foster the creativity of children worldwide, inspired by the imagination of Caine’s Arcade and the way a community came together to support it.

We now support 200 Creativity Chapters around the world, where kids meet each week to do unstructured creative play. We’re going to grow another 100 Chapters, thanks to this one million dollar grant from Vans Checkerboard Day, including Chapters for kids in refugee camps. Studies show that play can help kids deal with trauma and stress, especially at a young age.

Last year Imagination.org merged with Two Bit Circus Foundation, where we do S.T.E.A.M. Carnivals, and also have a cool program called ‘Trash 4 Teaching’ that collects clean waste from companies and makes it available in bulk for educators who subscribe for material delivery. We have two T4T warehouses that sort, store, and distribute these up-cycled materials to schools, diverting over 550 tons of clean waste from landfills to classrooms.

Last year, Two Bit Circus opened their first ‘micro-amusement park’ downtown, about a block from our loft – it’s a sixty thousand square foot state of the art, reimagined arcade experience, and it’s all about social gaming and getting strangers and friends to play together. It mixes VR and story rooms, escape rooms and physical games. And they have a robot bartender. The space is packed on the weekends and bustling on weeknights. During the weekdays, as the non-profit arm of Two Bit, we bring kids from underserved schools across L.A. on field trips to Two Bit where they can do experiential play, get their imagination lit up, and then prototype their own games using cardboard and up-cycled materials as part of their curriculum. Two Bit Circus parks will be expanding across the country, and we plan for the non-profit to grow along with it and bring these educational programs to more kids in more communities. We’ve also got an Inventor’s Challenge that we’ve been doing with AT&T Aspire, where kids invent solutions to problems they identify. And we do a lot of S.T.E.A.M. programs and professional development for educators. L.A. Makerspace also merged with our Two Bit collective of creative nonprofits, and we’ve helped create over a hundred maker spaces. So we’re at this fun intersection between play, creativity and creative reuse. I’ve been fortunate to be able to speak about this to

some large companies and educators at events. That has led to a lot of partnerships, including the one with Vans, who are all about empowering creative expression. They saw me share the story of Caine’s Arcade and Imagination.org at the WORLDZ conference last year, loved our story and decided to partner with us for their first international Vans Checkerboard Day on November 21st, where $1 Million of their global sales will benefit Imagination.org to foster creative expression.

People who want to help can find out more at Imagination.org and TwoBitCircus.org, and can support the programs by donating, volunteering, and sharing our story and programs with educators, parents, and kids in your community. Oh, and we’re also looking for companies to add our Reimagine Symbol to their cardboard boxes!

Erin: When this stuff comes in are you just kind of mind blown about what’s happening? Nirvan: Getting a million-dollar grant from a company as cool as Vans hardly ever happens in the non-profit space. Corporate giving is less than 1 percent of all philanthropic giving. It’s the hardest money to get, and it often comes with fewer strings, so you can use it operationally. This is the largest single grant that Vans has ever made, and we’re incredibly honored and excited for the impact it will have. That Imagination.org literally started with a door handle and one kid’s imagination still blows my mind. So, yes, it’s pretty mind-blowing.

Erin: If anybody is looking for inspiration they should take a moment to see what you’re doing. The way that you take the whole 360-degree approach is incredibly inspiring and also really refreshing. Usually, when people finish an idea they move on to the next. You allow ideas to grow and flourish and take on their own life, without having to control it in any way and allow the thread to weave its pattern. It’s really special and unique. Nirvan: I feel that ideas have an inherent sense of what they want to become and you have to choose your ideas very carefully because they become like a marriage. My projects often become a lifelong relationship. So I want to be selective because I want to take good care of them. I feel that ideas at a certain point come to life and tell you what they want to be. But it can take time. With Imagination.org, it took 7 years before we received our first million-dollar grant. Over that time, we built programs and developed more ideas. The grant is going to finally let us start to build

out one of the bigger ideas that I’d started sharing when speaking, to create a ‘Reimagine’ symbol that companies can add to their boxes, next to the Recycling symbol, so that before kids recycle a box, they’re invited to reimagine what that box can be. We can potentially take billions of boxes and turn them into building blocks for creative play. Eventually, we hope to create a free curriculum for educators worldwide to scale project-based learning in a way that hasn’t been done before – which I’ve always felt was the real potential of what Caine’s Arcade could become. The hope is to take our Cardboard Challenge from a million kids to 100 million kids in the next 5 to 10 years. This support from Vans will help to build out the online platform and app, which will become the ecosystem for ‘Reimagine’ projects made out of cardboard and up-cycled materials. It took 7 years to finally get to a place where we are getting the level of support we need to build bigger ideas like this. It’s going to be a really exciting next chapter for the Caine’s Arcade story.

To see where we’re at now and where we’re headed is exciting. It’s already gone beyond my imagination – to have an organization called Imagination.org and to be able to stay connected with so many kids and community. Picasso said that every child is an artist, the trick is how to remain one as you grow up.

Nirvan Mullick nirvan.com

Caine’s Arcade cainesarcade.com

Imagination imagination.org