Yes, I know it's a feel-good story, but encouraging this will bring a flood of me-too campaigns. That's what guidelines are for; Mom can pay for camp the way the rest of us do.
College student asking for money to pay university fees - that's tuition, that's "funding my life". Training course for the people producing the product, that they would not go on without the kickstarter and is essential to the production of the product at the end of the kickstarter? That's not "funding my life", that's kickstarter.
Tuition is a good example; this is exactly like "pay my Full Sail tuition and I'll give you copies of the games I make there," on a smaller scale.
" this is exactly like "pay my Full Sail tuition and I'll give you copies of the games I make there," on a smaller scale."
No, it is not. What's the product there? What product am I paying money to fund the creation of? What do I read about on the kickstarter page that the course is a necessary part of creating? No product.
I could fund a car as long as I produced a book about buying and owning the car.
If you're writing a book about a car that falls into the above, and you put on your kickstarter page that you need to buy the car in order to write the book, that's within the rules. Many, many, MANY kickstarters make it clear that they will be buying physical goods in order to create the product. If you want to do this, by all means go for it. I wouldn't be surprised if people decided not to fund it because they think you're trying to get a free car out of them, but purchase of goods (and services) with the kickstarter funds to help make the product is pretty much the whole point of kickstarter. In your case, I wouldn't be surprised if kickstarter themselves decided to squelch your project on the heavy suspicion that you don't really have a passion for a creating a book about the car, but that's up to them.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/annafischer/the-wild-pla...
Now, if there were another site that was strictly oriented to donations or even micro-loans toward such purposes, this kind of appeal would feel right there. But as it stands, I tend to stand on the side of "this wasn't a valid kickstarter."
Send me to college to learn things? There's no product, so it's not valid.
I'm making this product and I need this training course; there is a product.