The Clothing Drive continues...

Today we decided to kick our clothing drive up a notch, and found an excellent way to get the word across campus. We consulted our RCHS counselor, Mrs. Westmoreland, and she agreed to send out a faculty e-mail containing information about our charity. Due to the campus weather closings, we have decided to extend the deadline for our clothing drive. As of now we have collected over three large bags of clothing from various classmates, and are extremely optimistic about the future. We have also done a photo session, in order to obtain pictures that would be appropriate for our website, which is currently under construction, and should be up and running by mid April. We have also held many group meetings in order to discuss future events, and various ways in which we could obtain more supporters. Our main struggle right now is raising awareness about our charity projects, and getting our classmates motivated and involved. We want to get as many of our peers on board as possible, in order to make our projects an even greater success. Right now we are at the prime stages of developing a community wide Earth Day event, which will enable RCHS students to gain volunteer hours. We realize that by creating an event that promises students service learning hours, we would be able to gather a much larger group of motivated individuals. We have also been tracking our progress, and are extremely proud of where we are right now. Although we do wish to begin working on much larger projects, we know that all good things start small.

CLOTHING DRIVE

As many of you know the weather has been really rough lately, and due to school closings we were unable to set up donation boxes on the 1st as planned! Our charity clothing drive will begin on the 3rd of February, and continue trough the entire month. We are extremely excited about our latest project, and hope to make it a successful event which will benefit our community. I want to remind everyone to please bring at least one item of clothing. Every individual has the opportunity to make a difference, even the smallest act of kindness has the capability of setting off a positive chain of events. Since our classes are now in full swing we are trying our hardest to keep our charity work going, and our blog updated. If you haven't already, please follow us on twitter, and Facebook were you can find further information on our organization and latest expenditures. Remember there is power in numbers, and we cannot accomplish this without you guys! On thursday we plan on talking to our advisor Mrs.Westmoreland, regarding advertisements for our clothing drive. We hope to get an ad in the College newspaper, and perhaps even a shoutout on the local radio channel. We hope to start this clothing drive off strong, and raise over 600 articles of clothing. Although we are starting small, we hope to one day expand charity days into an organization that has the power to create significant change, not only in our community, but throughout the nation. A wise women once said, "We can do no great things, only small things with great love."  ~Mother Teresa
***wish us luck!

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.6

Day 75

     Thank you everyone for helping with our book drive. I know it has been awhile since I posted but this project called Charity Days has been doing wonderful. The book drive ended on November 29 (right on schedule). It was far more successful than I prayed for. As for right now my group will be planning and organizing our next aspiration.
   The book drive started off slowly but it ended with a wonderful bang. People were not bringing many books when the drive started but as soon as it was coming to a close the books started to pour in. I can not be more thankful for how well the drive went.We were aiming to raise at most 76 books but we ended up with over 100. I could not believe that we were able to raise that many on our first try. The exact number of children's books raised was either 117 or 120. All books were donated to the Salvation Army. Hopefully those books will reach kids in need in the Dallas area. The whole point of the drive was to advocate children's literacy and I hope that the children who receive those books will be able to read better with everyday. It is a known fact that thorough literacy has become a problem even in U.S. Children and even some adolescents have trouble everyday with reading and pronunciation of words. I know that raising a few books to give to worthy children won't make a strong substantial difference but at least it is a start. We started this special project not only to say that our generation can make a difference but also to instill a sparks in others to help their local and global communities. Surely as we go forward we will be able to generate greater effects in the Dallas area.  
   It's Christmas time, the time of giving, and also a time away from school and daily environments. My group and I are currently separated due to the Christmas season but will be reunited soon enough. Our next idea is to create either a food or clothes drive. Food is very important but people usually go out and buy food for a food drive. Clothes are almost as important as food but they can be given at no cost to the donor. We are leaning more to the idea of hosting a clothes drive because of its convenience. People can bring their used clothes for donation instead of buying canned goods to give away. I want the next drive to be even more successful. Thank you for everyones help, soon we will host our major charity function. This function is still nothing but an outline of ideas but as soon as January starts I am hoping to host meetings to begin the process.
   Charity Days has been going better than I had hoped for. People of different ages (particularly teenagers) have been coming up to me and my co-creators asking if there are any position which they can hold. Right now we have three established PR representatives. Hopefully they can get the word out about this project and recruit others who wish to help. Other have asked for different positions, but since I have little experience in running a non-profit project finding and managing positions has become a bit of a hassle. But as the days pass my co-creators and I will be able to manage this project more efficiently and throughly.
    Instead of posting everyday as I used to do, my group has decided to post an update every week. But this decision is not set in stone I may post more than once a week if something of importance comes up.           

Days 25 - 31

     Hello I am so happy to congratulate my team on starting our first book drive. Tomorrow everyone should be aware of the drive and hopefully the books will just start flowing in. Besides having people donating books we will also accept monetary donations. Since the all the proceeds will go towards the Salvation Army nothing will be lost. Tomorrow since that is the set date of the book drive I will have information on how you guys can help and donate.
     Everything seems to be on track now the flyers are going to go out, the majority of my team has been able to maintain good grades, college and scholarship applications have been sent out, and we are planning future en devours. Day 26 I was hoping that we could get the flyers out but the group had disagreements on how it should look. Several drafts were made before we settled on one. The final draft is simple but should catch a person's attention. Since we wanted an aspect of "girly-ness" pink lettering was chosen for some of the words. The previous draft I assume was a little to "girly" for some of the groups liking. Even though we are four girls we didn't want the flyers to be to feminine; we wanted other people to relate to the flyer as well. So our final product is just right and if it needs tweaking we can always do it later since the drive doesn't end until November 29th.
   I was also appreciative that everyone of us was able to finish the majority of our college applications and keep our grades on track. I don't want this project to get in the way of everyone's academic life so I trying my hardest to make that a top priority. If one of us needs tutoring I try to make sure that it's taken care of. So far none off us really need tutoring except Najah and me (in math). As long as all of us keep up this time management doing other charity drives and events will not be so hard.
   As for now we are brainstorming on ideas for our next event. Whether it should be a toy drive or a full blown event is undecided as of right now. A toy drive would be great since Christmas is right around the corner. But the problem with that is many other organizations do toy drives. Maybe if we collected money to create gift bags/baskets to give out at homeless shelters. There are tons of ideas in the air but we have to choose one and fast because December/January is closing in fast.
  I hope that all of you reading this blog can help out in some fashion. Whether it is starting your own projects to help out your local community or donating to help our cause, anything is welcomed. Our goal as it has been is to inspire others to help their communities. We may be a small group of teenagers but with your help we all can make a difference.  

Day 24

      Today was a pretty good day. It was Halloween and Sunday. With it being Sunday and Halloween I had barely any real contact with the rest of my group members but let's look at the bright side. Today my church said they would speak with me in a "few." Now we can actually print out flyers officially start this thing. What I've decided (which I will talk with the rest of group tomorrow about) is that Charity Days should just go ahead and start the book drive with the one location we have acquired. Sure it is in a portable on the other side of campus but if people really want to give they surely will walk.
Remember when suggested one of those four organizations to take our books well we've completely scratched that idea. Instead we are going to give the books to a local salvation army office. In Dallas there is one on harry hines which would be very convenient. On top of the convenience books would go to children in the local Dallas area.
    So far so good. We have pretty much everything planned out and I'm sure we're good to start this week. All that's left is expanding our venues. Tomorrow I will also ask Najah and Sundas if they wouldn't mind asking their mosques if they would mind accommodating our book drive.
With this finally coming together I'm more than excited. For all the people who read this blog I'm going to put information up about donating children's books for this cause on Facebook, Twitter and here. It would be really appreciated if you can help especially if your in the Dallas area.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.4

Day 9 - 23

      Sorry guys for the absence of blog posts but the rest of the group was quite busy. I decided that we all needed to take about two weeks off to deal with other commitments and school. On day 11 we did try to to start the book drive but an obstacle came in our way. Since our school is on a college campus we can not just set up boxes we have to go through a school related club or organization. When we asked the office of student life we were required to get a high school club to sponsor us even though there were no other book drives present. Monica and I decided that academic and peer mentors club that we are part of would love to help. With this assumption I sent an email to the group but still have not received a response. I did however get a spot with the permission of a particular high school spot on campus. Hopefully we can officially start on the whole college campus to be really successful.
      Tomorrow to spread our cause further I am going to meet with my pastor to see of he will accommodate our book drive. I have a feeling he will say yes. If he does say yes we can then proceed to print flyers and make people officially aware. For the most part we are more than off track. We realized that this effort would be hard but not as hard as it has been.
We are definitely sorry for our absence but now we're back and ready. Senior year is hard on us but we have to make this effort a reality.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.4

Day 8

We finally set up the collection boxes for our book drive! We have established specific locations for the collection of our books in various areas at our school. One of those designated areas is in Kiowa right in front of the attendance office. We hope to collect enough books in order to make our first project a success. Since the holidays are quickly arriving we hope to move on to even bigger projects, such as a canned food drive and perhaps even a clothing drive. Although we did have a slow start we are extremely satisfied with the progress of our work so far. Although we are working on miscellaneous projects we feel that it is vital to take small steps towards attempting to achieve our ultimate goal of creating a city-wide Charity Carnival.

Day 6 - 7

       Our first weekend in this venture has not been as productive as we had planned but its okay. Since all of us had previous  engagements that we committed too, we had no time to discuss and plan out the rest of our book drive. Hopefully tomorrow we will all be able to meet up finishing planning out the last bits of this first project. If we can collectively agree on all the terms of the book drive then surely we will be able to pass out completed flyers by Thursday. With our first project it has seemed impossible to find a set date to start but if anything the book drive should start officially next week.

P.S.    Wish us luck; we have no experience going into this so by your support and our intuition  we pray that this is at least a marginal success.

Day 5

Okay so Day Five  was a pretty wonderful day, although we changed some of the workings in our book drive we were able to accomplish a lot. We decided that instead of having books donated to a reputable hospital that we would donate the books to an organization that advocates literacy in children. There are many such organizations out there, the only problem is picking the one that is best for us. What our group settled upon is four organizations by the names of Books First, Page Ahead, Book Ends, and Books For America. We swaying towards Page Ahead but we will not have a certain decision until later.

  We want this book drive to be successful so we are going off slow; starting at our high school then expanding to other venues. We understand that although this project is not as large or as tedious as our main charity event will it will still need time to be nurtured. Hopefully when we have different venues for more people to donate this book drive will be a smooth stepping stone.