When I heard the first time from @randomwanderings that there could be a chance for the Finish the Story Contest to be supported by @curie (the Arcadia of every writer on Steemit) I almost fell from the chair: we were on the right track!

There are communities that develop contests, this instead is a contest from which a community is rapidly evolving: the @bananafish' Realms. There's a reason for this choice and I'll grab the opportunity of this application for giving a brief insight about what animates the Bananafish as the home for the Finish the Story (fiction) and the recent Mizu no Oto (haiku poetry) contests.

Here below please find the Q&A taken from @curie's Community Building Support project

1. What is your community/contest and what is its purpose here on Steem?

There are so many things to say that I'll put forward a couple of ideas in points:

• Our core values: quality, inclusion, friendship, solidarity, an easy going environment.

• This is a genuine project made by minnows with little material assets, whose greatest resources are: passion, building things with lot of work and care (see the design or the post curation for a clear example), truly caring for everyone.

• This is a project that aims to be a shared, non-hierarchic initiative and to give a space for everyone (i.e., people can write the first half of the story and talk about themselves).

• About the contest format: a healthy competition helps to understand the right direction for improving and learning together.

• What we do and what's our purpose on Steemit: actually, we run two weekly contests, the main one is Finish the Story and our new entry is the Mizu no Oto haiku poetry contest, whose principles you may find here.
  Our purpose on Steemit is to create interesting stories and poetry, pushing ourselves always a step further in our writing skills and believing in the power of creativity and imagination: we want to enrich ourselves and the whole Steemit with good contents.

2. How much support are you seeking per month for the two-month period?

I am deeply grateful for all the support that you already gave to this project. My plan in the long run is to make the contest/s self sustainable and, perhaps, to attract the interest of some good Samaritan wishing to pledge a conspicuous delegation. Sustainability is also why in the contest SBI shares are awarded, giving the possibility for the Bananafish to also receive a permanent vote for every share given to the winners. I have to say that we already gathered 11 delegations and I'm so grateful to our brave Bananafish Knights, who helped enormously in giving to our @bananafish vote a sense (actually it's voting at 0.02 with 501 SP, way better than nothing!).

The more common support amounts will be in the 100 - 200 Steem range.

Taking your range into consideration and clarifying that I'm more than grateful for everything you may decide to allocate, the request would be 52 STEEM per month, total 104 STEEM. As much as the @bananafish' votes, such funds are 100% intended to reward the community members and contests'participants for their worthy contributions. I forgot to add: 100% of the payouts from the @bananafish' posts go into power-up for better voting and in STEEM used for the contests' pots.

3. How will this support be used?

Finish the Story weekly pot: 8 STEEM
Mizu no Oto weekly pot: 3 STEEM
Weekly contribution for those that will write the story prompt: 2 STEEM*

*The STEEM may be converted in SBI as long as we need to increase the @bananafish VP.

4. Approximately how many users participate in your community or contest?

In 27 weekly editions of the Finish the Story contest, a total amount of 338 stories have been written, with an average of 12-13 stories per week. The first week of the poetry contest collected a total of 16 entries.

5.How will supporting your community or contest help grow the Steem community?

The Bananafish project aims to make Steemit interesting for its contents, providing quality stories and poems that someone would read just out of interest, whether he's a Steemian or not. We focus on human interactions and believe that Steemit will be successful only when it's economical aspect will be accompanied by real values and true content engagement.

Thank you @curie and @randomwanderings for this amazing opportunity once again!