With breaks for students and teachers and longer days, summer is the perfect time for Oakland's creatives.

The extra hours and warm weather have been known to get creative juices flowing - creating an early harvest of visual and performing arts.

Each week this summer, we'll list creative crowdfunding projects with pending deadlines. This list mainly features the two crowd funding sites to remain popular over the years: Indiegogo and Kickstarter. We've also added USA Projects to the weekly check-in. Not just anyone can apply - USA Project's site only allows projects from artists who have already received an award, grant, fellowship or residency.

While Indiegogo first became known as the spot to raise money for independent films, it's now expanded to include all kinds of creative and community projects. Kickstarter has always featured both creative works and small business ventures. Kickstarter requires campaigns to meet their full funding goal in order to receive any of the donation money. Indiegogo offers more flexible funding options - for a fee and also has been building strategic partnerships with national and local filmmaker nonprofits like Women Make Movies and the San Francisco Film Society.

Here are just a few of the crowd funding projects with deadlines next week. We've listed them in chronological order - with the most urgent requests at the top of the list. 

June 17-23

June 17
Last Magic

June 19
Long Live the Dead  

June 20
Spektra Primary Extinction 

West Oakland Stories

June 22
Turning Rumi: Singing Verses of Love, Unity and Freedom  

June 23
The Gold Fish 

Note: Rocket Hub, Loudsauce, Fans Next Door, Crowd Tilt, and several other crowdfunders either didn't have projects from Oakland or didn't allow us to search by city. Thus, they are not included in this list. If you notice something Local we didn't - on any crowd funding site - please feel free to post it in the comments below.    

To view a larger list of projects with an Oakland connection, click here for Kickstarter and here for Indiegogo. (Look closely, sometimes Oakland, Florida projects pop up in these lists.) For USA Projects, select "Location: Near Me" to view Oakland works.  

For non-artist related crowd funding, check out these sites.

Spot.Us
Recently acquired by the Public Insight Network, Spot.Us is a crowd funding platform for journalists. Many Oakland Local writers have received support from this site and we look forward to seeing more local and indie journalists pitch and fund important stories here in 2012.

Donors Choose allows public school teachers to put together money for learning essentials like microscopes, blank music sheets, chess boards, digital projectors, field trips and more. Projects do not have deadlines - the site continues to take donations until the goal is met. Oakland projects can be found here.  

Angel List connects small startups to angel investors. Right now it lists 53 startups in Oakland.