Last year was the first year that I really got involved within my school, joining every last club I could get my hands on. And looking back now, it was a hugely rewarding experience in every respect; I learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and got to do my part to make the world a better place.
One of the groups I joined was “Free the Children”, which was basically our school’s chapter of the international humanitarian organization. So just another one of those fundraising groups. But not really.
From the beginning of the year, we were faced with a hurdle. The administrative team at our school was frankly, not too thrilled about another lengthy line-up of fundraising initiatives. This was because in previous years, some groups had gone over the top, forming irritating little clusters of fundraising events. Every week they’d ask the student body to bring in five dollars for freezies or ice cream sandwiches or cookies, often to benefit highly selfish causes. Thus, we were naturally not aiming to follow in these footsteps, and so we asked ourselves this question:
How can we get money without asking for money?
And by this, we didn’t mean that we wanted to use some subtle combination of psychological warfare tactics, to pressure our classmates into giving money. Rather, we actually wanted students never to have to bring in money to buy this or buy that. We needed some sort of alternative…
Then, voila! We came across an organization called Bag2School and what these guys do is that they provide your school with a bunch a blue garbage bags. You will fill these bags with clothes and for every tonne of material you collect and hand over, they will give you $200.
Now, at the time, that seemed like a whole lot of material and I didn’t believe we’d be able to get even half a tonne. However, in the end, we collected almost 1.5 tonnes of clothing and got a generous little bonus, so they gave us a little more than $300.
And we were an elementary school. Think about what a high school or college would be able to do.
