Charity
The 501st Legion was founded as a fun club to let Star Wars fans show off their amazing, screen accurate costumes. Since its very early days, however, the Legion has become a force for good in our territories. Rather than profiting from our appearances, the money we collect is donated to charity. Generally we lean towards children’s charities but this is in no way fixed. As long as the cause is worthy, we will be willing to give it our support.
At the Scandinavian Sci-Fi, Game and Film Convention in Stockholm in 2006, Nordic Garrison’s members made our first attempt to collect money for charity. We hadn’t yet decided who we would make our donations to, just that we wanted to do our bit to help. We asked the public to pay 25SEK to take a photograph with us against our Death Star background. The result was much better than we hoped and we raised 7000 SEK. We then stepped things up and offered the chance to buy a printed photograph, then a photo mounted on a homemade background and finally a photo in a professionally printed folder just like you get at theme parks all around the world.
Nowadays we attend several large events each year and, on an average weekend, collect around $4000. From that we deduct the expense of producing the photo folders, printer ink and so on and then a further 10% which is used to develop Nordic Garrison’s stands around our territory. The remainder is donated to charity.
We also attend corporate events where we charge a fee which is also donated to charity.
Our goal is not to make money for ourselves but to help others. If you are interested in having us attend an event then please visit our Contact Us page.
You can see which charities we support and what donations we have made by following the links to the left.