On the strength of a Kickstarter campaign that met its $100,000 goal in seven days, Scarecrow Video will convert to a 501(c)(3) non-profit beginning (tentatively) this October. […] What does that mean, exactly? The store’s co-owners, Carl Tostevin and Mickey McDonough, described it as “a community-supported, publicly available, non-profit film library and resource,” which may sound like a high-falutin’ description of a video store already. […] Scarecrow has a far clearer vision about the other major half of its upcoming non-profit efforts. “A huge part of our plans and dreams for Scarecrow is a more robust educational program,” Barr said. “Get kids in here early and expose them to filmmaking, all the way through to adults taking master classes, drilling down films and ripping them apart, looking at them in-depth.” […] For established educators in high schools and universities, Scarecrow also plans to launch a long-term loan program, so that even the most underfunded arts institutions can enjoy easy access to the complete works of Kurosawa, or a hundreds-strong collection of cheesy educational shorts, or the kinds of B-movie exploitation films that have been lost in the transition to newer formats. […] Scarecrow should be able to accomplish its mission of becoming a more accessible home for film curation and preservation, the kind of institution that seeks to marry the balance between widening public access to a film collection, equal parts current and historic, while sustaining its contributing artists with fair pay. A curated, brick-and-mortar response to a seemingly endless glut of online media. That’s the comparison point that Scarecrow wants people to think of when they flip through their favorite streaming services. – Sam Machkovech,Ars Technica

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