Oh. My. Gosh. Fundraising was a huge amount of work, both physically and emotionally. There were several down points throughout the year where I really felt like I was not going to be able to raise the £5900 needed. But here we are. It was the 24th June when I managed to reach my total and I burst into tears. It was a huge weight off my mind.
So a couple of weeks after selection I finally received my letter through the post. Thailand was the county that I was most likely to go to, then Malaysia and then Japan. I was thrilled at this news! Although my first choice was Japan, Thailand looked amazing and as soon as I got my letter I went straight onto the Project Trust website to look at the projects in Thailand, Thai culture, climate and previous volunteer's experiences. Thailand is predominantly Buddhist which worked in my favour as I had recently become interested in Buddhism and I couldn't wait to learn more whilst I was out there. By this time I was rearing to get going already! Only one thing stood in the way...
Fundraising. Yes, the momentous task of fundraising £5900 before July of next year. At this time this seemed like a small feat. Previously I had managed to raise £1000 for a charity in only one summer through bake sales, collecting and a sponsored event. So I thought raising £5900 over a year would be relatively easy.
Oh my gosh, I have never been so wrong.
I started off with a car boot sale which went better than expected and I managed to raise £100. This was followed my a cake sale at my dad's work. This worked well as well, police officers always like cake and as we set no price on the cakes people often paid £1-2 for the cake and on the odd occasion over the various cake sales dad held over the year people would even donate a fiver. The average cake sale at dad's work made £30-50 depending on what was being sold. Brownies made the most profit. So by the end of September I had managed to raise £130. Not bad considering it was only the first month.
My next fundraising event was a movie night at my school for the sixth form. This was very painful to organise. First of all we (mum, dad and I) actually had to hire out the sixth form room which was quite expensive even though we managed to get it at a cheaper rate. This took weeks to organise due to health and safety rules - maybe a teacher had to be present - which meant I had to go and look for a teacher which was extremely difficult as the teachers were having some sort of party the night I intended to host the movie. Anyway, after the room finally got sorted out (at the expense of several of my lunchtimes) we were able to start advertising We then had to sort out food. We wrote around to various pizza companies to see if they would do us a discount on the pizzas. Papa John's pizza gave us the best deal - we got all the pizzas at not much above cost price. We also bought some popcorn and some fizzy drinks to feed everyone on the night.
The day of the movie night I only had about 10 people coming but as the day went on several more people came up to me and requested tickets so in the end we had about 21 people attending which meant I made £117!
Afterwards I wrote out a thank you card to Papa John's and they offered to do the same thing again if I ever did another event which required pizza - which shows its important to say thank you!
Anyway I think that's enough for today. I'll post another entry about my fundraising efforts over the next couple of days! xx
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