Fundraising

When we started fundraising I had all kinds of worries.  Would people give just because they felt obligated and then harbor negative feelings towards us?  Would no one give?  Would people feel that we are asking too much?  Would people think that it is odd for us to fundraise for ourselves instead of some other more worthy cause?  Would we miraculously get pregnant on our own and make everyone who gave to us feel swindled?

Well, maybe these fears are founded.  Maybe people are talking about these things behind our backs or thinking negative things about us.  But, what we have seen so far has been just the opposite.  We have been so lucky that people have seemed happy to help and have shown amazing generosity.  We are putting ourselves out there to either be rejected or encouraged, but I guess if we didn’t take the risk, we would never be able to see how generous and encouraging those around us can be.  That, and we would not be as financially stable as we would like to be in order to welcome a second child into our home.

We started out our fundraising small with a garage sale.  We asked friends and family to donate anything they wanted to get out of their houses.  We were so excited to get so many items from friends and family.  This was a nice easy fundraiser to ask for help on because I think many of the people who donated were almost as happy to get these items out of their houses as we were to take them in.  For three days we set up our little store in our driveway and catered to a woman who swore that Ann Taylor Loft was closing its doors for good, a man who wanted to buy a piece of lingerie and a “tickle stick” for a “special lady”, a boy who wanted to know if we had a return policy, and a woman who felt that 50 cents was way too steep a price to pay for a small toy.  The garage sale shoppers kept us entertained and helped us raise money for our first payment to the adoption agency.  Overall, it was a success.  If we had more time with nice weather we would have done at least one more garage sale.

Our next fundraiser event is a restaurant night which will be held on December 6th.  We were given two options that the restaurant offers.  We could either invite people, have them order whatever they want and we would receive 10% of the cost of their bill if they had proof that they were with our group or we could sell tickets to the event at $25 each and we would receive $10  for each ticket sold.  We went back and forth and asked friends and family for opinions.  We worried that $25 per ticket was too much to ask, but we also knew that getting 10% of the revenue of those with our group probably would not make the event worth it.  We decided to sell the $25 tickets so that we could have an event that would make our efforts worthwhile.  We are hoping that we will be as pleasantly surprised with this event as we were with the garage sale.  We know that this event is really our one big fundraising opportunity.  We feel that it would be rude to continue inviting the same people to more fundraising events.  So, if you are a friend or family member reading this, you can breathe a sigh of relief!  We are crossing our fingers and hoping that it is a success.

We hope to come up with some other great ways to raise money as we continue through our journey.  Perhaps we can use our newly polished garage sale sales skills on ebay and craigslist.  We have a long way to go to the final cost of the whole process, but we have time and we will keep working at it.  If you are reading this and you have already donated to us in some way, thank you, thank you, thank you!!!  I am still trying to figure out some way that I can repay everyone who has helped us.  I don’t think that anything I can do would be good enough because you are helping us add another child to our family.  How can I even come close that?