Friday night we had our big event! We set up the tables and it all looked perfect. We got plenty of decorations and had all of our raffle baskets set up. We ended up with 7 baskets and had many tickets in each of them. We also had a jug for any generous donations! After counting it all up we ended up with $10,000!! Due to an amazing anonymous donor we got a dollar to dollar match. The raffles were a huge success and gave us a lot of our money as-well as the entire student section wanting shirts! It was a lot of fun and everyone was impressed with how well we did. We had consistent raffle buyers and many people hoping to win a basket. At the end of the 3rd quarter we announced our winners and they were all so excited. We had great baskets created by great people. We gained so much experience from this and can't believe how well we did. It was so much fun seeing everyone purchase shirts and baskets or even giving just a donation. I hope to do something similar again. It is amazing to help out an organization that could use it. The Hope Center's rent a month is $10,000, so being able to cover that gives them opportunities to buy other things for their organization. Once again, I am extremely proud of how well we did and hope to help out in other areas that I can!
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Our fundraiser is just around the corner. We are finishing up getting raffle baskets for our event. We have 5 baskets currently. We have a family game night basket created by First Merchant bank. We have a Dentist basket created by Gentle Dentist. Another basket is a new pal apparel basket created by the Axehead threads. Lastly we have an eye care basket and a cakehole basket. We are so excited to show these off and see how many raffles we can get on them. We have worked very hard the past months and it is all coming together. Selling the shirtsWe started selling shirts on Monday in the mornings before school. Our first day was not as successful due to people not knowing to bring their money. Today was a huge success though! We had sent emails prior to this morning that you must pick it up in the morning before school, and we now have sold all of our small and mediums! We have re-ordered shirts for the game because we are confident we are going to sell almost all of our shirts. Everyone is loving the designs and ready to rock the shirts for the "hoops for hope" theme night. We have also gotten all of our decorations ready and created our buckets for raffle tickets. We also posted on social media to gain some more attention. This really helped to grab everyones attention and get ready for the big game and buy a shirt! After the big event we ended up selling 264/280 shirts!
Here is a list of our sponsors. We are very proud of how far we have come. We are thankful to each of these sponsors for their support and donations to help us benefit the Hope Center!
My group and I are in the first stages of our project. We are gathering different sponsors for our shirts and emailing them to see who is willing to help. So far we have 7 sponsors. We have picked up checks and are at $1,550. We are hoping to get 9 sponsors for the back our shirts. All sponsors will also get signage at the event. We are continuing to send out emails and reach out to different places we think may be interested in helping.
Below is our informational paper that we are sending out to each business. After we collect all of our sponsors for the shirt we are going to look for businesses that would like to create a raffle basket for us. We would give them a specific basket idea such as "self care" and they then can go out and buy items related to that topic. In our class we have many different projects going on. One project being a fundraiser for Riley children's hospital called Red for Riley. The project was ran by two classmates, Kenzie Kleiman and Vivian Miller. My group and I decided that we were going to give them an extra hand and help out. We helped them sell rally towels at lunch and hand out bracelets. Friday they had their big game and ended up raising around $2,000! They did an awesome job and helping them out has also help us know what direction to take in starting our project. Day 2 at the Hope Center we really got some work done. We checked out the bin and had a lot to go through. Piles and piles of bags of clothes waiting to be sorted through. We got to work fast and had the bin cleared. We took around 15 bags of clothes, shoes, and purses inside. From there we had to sort through what we were keeping and what would be donated again to goodwill. We had two big bins, 1 for keeping and 1 for goodwill, and they both got filled to the brim. The clothes that we were deciding to keep for the different Hope Centers were kept in the bin for the day to later be hung. We ran out of time, but will be putting them on hangers and steaming them the next time we are there.
The clothes that will be donated to goodwill were put back into bags and taken to a trailer outside. The trailer gets filled over a span of two weeks and then taken to goodwill for drop-off. All that was left in the bin was a table missing a leg. We decided it would be a good idea to keep. One of the residents may really like it and they can put it back together. Although it says women's clothing only, we get a variety of different clothes and different items! Our first day at the Hope Center we got to have a little fun. The boutique was putting out new clothes and needed some modelers. We had got there at the right time and got to show off some new clothes. Here is my partners Bella and Jocelynn on the Hope Center Indy Boutique Instagram! After trying on all the new clothes, we started our work in the donation room. In the donation room, there is many different clothing items, shoes, purses, and more. Outside of the room is a bin where anyone can come and drop off donations. From there, my partners and I will go through all the clothes and decide what will be kept and what will be donated to goodwill. After, sorting through everything we will hang, steam, and price. The clothing will then be sold on the thrift racks in the 3 different redefined locations.
Back at the school, we spent the rest of the week working on T-shirt designs! We are going to have a design on the front and sponsors on the back. We also got a confirmed date of December 8th for our fundraiser night. Our ProjectOur Project is called Hoops for Hope. We are planning to host a fundraiser on December 8th at a double-header Basketball game. Our school will be playing against our biggest rivals, so we are expecting a big crowd. We will have raffle donation baskets, Chick-Fil-A, t-shirts, and chuck-a-duck. We hope to raise a lot of money that we are going to be giving to Hope Center Indy. Along with the donations we will be giving we also hope to raise awareness in our community. The Hope Center is a place where women go after they have been victims of sex trafficking. It is a horrible thing that women could be experiencing and there is a place right in our backyard to help. We hope to bring a change and see a difference. "You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again you did not know." How it startedWe began our brainstorming process by looking through different projects in the past. We saw lots of great ideas and different types of fundraisers, but none that truly spoke to us the way this idea did. One of my group members, Jocelynn Flagle, works at Hope Center Indy. She was very passionate about helping with the dog barn they have there. It is where dogs learn to smell a specific chemical in electronics. This will help them find different microchips and hard drives where human traffickers can be storing images and videos of victims suffering from this treatment. At first we were going to make just that our project but after some thinking we realized that many people are going to be more open to donating to the organization as a whole rather than just the dog barn. This way the proceeds can be split among the Hope Center and all the different programs it has. We wanted this to be big, and we knew it couldn't be during the fall season because of another project from fellow classmates that we are helping with. We decided to make it happen during the winter and we thought what better way to host a fundraiser than to have it at a school basketball game that a big portion of the community will attend. Thankfully, the game will be on one of the biggest games of the season. We are hoping to raise $5,000 and find a dollar to dollar match which will bring us to $10,000. The Hope center is a Faith based organization, so we are asking many different churches for their support and inviting them to attend the game. Pitch DayAfter gathering all of the information we needed we were eager to hear back from the administrators on what ideas they also had for our project. We had included all of the different logistics for our project such as dates, what we need, and what we will do in the mean time. We discussed all of the resources we will be needing. This includes approval for game, raffle basket supplies, donators/sponsors, and T-shirts to create. Our main point was discussing what our mission is. Stopping the spread of human trafficking. We want more awareness in our community and if we are lucky we hope to spread farther than that and let the seriousness be known of the situation to many more places. The administrators thought our presentation was amazing and gave great feedback. Our project was a go! |
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