Dear Curie Team & 
When I saw that you were offering to support new communities & contests, I couldn’t have been happier! It isn’t easy to start a community from scratch without any connections to support an idea, and especially without any funding.
When I founded Vegans of Steemit on Discord 6 months ago, I didn’t have any expectations about the community’s development, but when so many people started joining our group, I realized that Vegans of Steemit had real growth potential. We currently have 182 members and the group keeps growing daily.
Sadly many steemians who were very active at the inception of our group have since then gone quiet due to the low price of steem, and I’m trying very hard to keep the engagement alive. Of course, having virtually no VP and being just a minnow myself, it makes it harder to support others.
Our account on Steemit was created just over a month ago, and we don’t have any delegations thus far. To gain visibility from the Steemit community, I’ve been publishing a weekly newsletter to showcase selective posts of our members, along with a voting trail which automatically upvotes selected Steemians who consistently publish quality posts. Since our VP is so low at the moment, these votes don’t really make a difference just yet.
As I mentioned earlier, many of our members have gone quiet because they don’t find the current rewards interesting enough to keep blogging. It’s a shame, because many of these members are talented and had posted high quality content. Others are still active sporadically, but don’t actively engage with others due to lack of motivation. Only a handful is consistently creating content and present in the chat group. This is something I would like to change.
Currently, we have several members of our group who publish their own contests (like 
If we had your support, we would be uniting our efforts and launch contests such as #fruitsandveggiesmonday under the umbrella of Vegans of Steemit, all while offering higher rewards to the participants in the form of prizes and upvotes. The author of each contest would also be rewarded some liquid steem and/or a % through the community’s post payouts. Since payouts are still very low, a fixed amount of steem to reward community authors makes more sense at the beginning. By doing this, we are looking to increase participation and engagement within our community, all while attracting new members.
Our estimate is that with 100 steem per month we could offer nice rewards and also remunerate the author of each contest.
With a gracious donation of liquid Steem we could power up part of it, in order to be able to support our community more! Boosting our voting power means being able to better reward the members who constantly post quality and are currently undervalued, with the help of our voting trail.
The majority in our group falls under this category unfortunately, and if Curie offered some support we could change that. This would in turn make it more enticing for more vegans and vegetarians to join our community and voting trail, motivate them to blog more, and we could gain some real traction. The way I see it, the more people join and help each other, the more we will have the ability to support the newer undervalued accounts.
It would be nice to start with a VP of 1000 steem in the form of steempower, but I realize that I'm asking for a very high amount. The reality is that that's what it would take to make a difference, but of course we'd be happy with any amount that we would receive from you.
@evecab #3313).