Right now in Ann Arbor, there's a one-of-a-kind philanthropic opportunity that requires participants to open up their creative minds instead of their wallets.

The event, entitled the Fundred Dollar Bill Project, is a national fundraiser looking to collect three million “fundreds,” which are "individual, unique artworks (called fundreds) that look like hundred dollar bills with all the symbology removed and left to the individual to create,” according to Mary Rubin, the project's director of national affairs.

Fundreds drawn by students, faculty and community members in Ann Arbor are being gathered by School of Art & Design Academic Programs Assistant Brian Banks until March 31, when an armored truck will come to campus to collect the illustrated donations.

This truck, which runs completely on vegetable oil, has been traveling around the country, stopping at collection centers and picking up the fake hundred dollar bills designed by students and community members. The truck will eventually make its way to Washington, D.C., where the Fundred Dollar Bill Project will ask Congress for an even exchange — 3 million fundred dollars for $300 million in U.S. currency, all to be put toward remediating lead levels in New Orleans soil.

The Fundred Dollar Bill project was started about two and a half years ago by an artist named Mel Chin, who was emotionally drained after visiting post-Katrina New Orleans.

“(The damage) was so much that I felt inadequate to respond as a creative individual,” Chin explained. “But because of that I was compelled to return again and again to do research, to find out what we could do — what was possible and what was not possible.”

During his time in New Orleans, Chin and his team of researchers were led to discover the issue of lead contamination, how bad it was in the city and the immense impact it was having on the population — especially children.

“I found out that it was not only bad, but the second worst in the entire country,” Chin said. “Also, it was a situation that had left 30 to 50 percent of the inner city childhood population lead-poisoned. And this was before the storm.”

“I asked how much it would cost to at least complete a transformation of the situation, which was a big heavy figure — $300 million,” Chin said. “But when I asked how much was allocated to solve this problem, and they said none, that’s where the project began.”

The goal of Fundred is to raise support for Operation Paydirt, the implementation of the scientific method developed for stabilizing lead levels in New Orleans. The method will neutralize lead levels in the soil and turn the hazardous material into a bio-unavailable mineral that, if ingested by a child, cannot be absorbed into the bloodstream.

Rubin said there are 86,000 properties in New Orleans with lead levels in the soil higher than what the EPA deems acceptable for a child to have bare-hand contact with. Lead contamination causes many health issues which often contribute to a number of serious problems for children, including decreased performance in school, juvenile delinquency, Attention Deficit Disorder and violent crime.

“It stands to reason that if you can remove one little environmental factor that contributes to these issues, you stand to potentially shift the health of society,” Rubin said. “Because if you look around the country, the cities that have high lead contamination are the cities that have high violence — New Orleans, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Providence — it just goes on.”

Chin said the relationship between lead and our culture has implications that can directly affect anyone, in any city, anywhere in the country because it is a problem that reaches far beyond New Orleans.