The game was a monumental success! Likely due to the Chick-Fil-A donated by the school, and the extra money so generously given by the people at the game, we raised a total of $1357! Also, unknown to us, JC, the two Greenfield girls Abby and Haley, and I were all awarded the IHSAA Face of Sportsmanship, which I am beyond grateful for. We also did our last collection with all of the businesses and made a total of $176.08, bringing us to a grand total of $2,623.08 for the project! This obliterated my goal of getting $2000, which at the time of setting the goal, I thought was unrealistic. However, the pure kindness of others proved me very wrong. To conclude the project, we will be spending the most recent money we collected, collecting all of the gifts, and delivering them to the hospital. We will be delivering the first round of gifts that we have right now before Christmas so that kids in the hospital can enjoy the new toys for Christmas.
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This has been a month of planning for the Greenfield vs New Palestine basketball game, along with two collections. From the collections from the local businesses, we made 130 more dollars and 31 cents. We have also made big advancements for the basketball game. We talked with the athletic director about logistics for our fundraiser and it turned out better than I could have imagined. Mr. Cooper said that it would be possible for us to give free Chic-Fil-A sandwiches with a 3 dollar or more donation to the hospital. This can potentially double the total amount of money we have right now, and considering the game is against a rival school, the turnout should be massive. Soon we will get all of our money officially counted, and this event will be the conclusion to our project. We will spend the money we collected, deliver the items to the hospital, and then wrap it up. Pictured above is the flyer we plan on printing and putting up around the school We also officially counted all of the money we have at First Merchant's Bank, converting the bills and change into bigger bills. Once we got the bigger bills, we bought gift cards so that we could purchase the items on Amazon. On Black Friday, using the cards, my partner bought a total of 32 toys, games, and etc. Hearing "32 toys" didn't really click with me just how much that is. Seeing the display of toys as the culmination of all the work we've done so far is chilling, and we're only halfway there if the game goes as well as we hope.
This was a low-key month for the project. We plan to set up another Donation War (with proper advertising in advance) at the Greenfield vs. New Palestine basketball game, but that is a far-away event that we will start planning for soon. While there were no events to plan for, we routinely collected the donations from the local businesses around New Palestine, and found what items from the Amazon wishlist to spend it on. We raised $344.83 from the collections alone, bringing us to a grand total of $822.31! Pictured below is a spreadsheet with all of our collections, our totals, and a mock budget for what we will buy for the hospital.
My name is Colin Darley and with my partner JC Wilson, I chose to start a donation for patients at Peyton Manning Children's Hospital. I ended up choosing this project because I was inspired by the Legos For Riley project (linked here) done by Jesi Hall, Addie Halter, and Whitney Miller. The Legos for Riley project was a donation where they collected either Lego donations or financial donations to buy said Legos to eventually give them all to Riley hospital for the kids there. This really struck a chord with me. My brother has been diagnosed with cancer two different times, so between chemotherapy and surgery, he spent a great deal of time in the hospital. Reading the project blog made me realize that I could use the idea of that project but apply it to Peyton Manning Children's Hospital to make it personal to my brother's experience. After some research, I discovered that the hospital had an Amazon Wishlist of items that kids would like so it was the perfect thing to raise money for. Pitch Day went very smoothly. Obviously, it's going to be nerve-wracking to present to anyone, much less the school administrators for a project I might work on for months. However, the amount of time I had to think through the logistics and get ready for the presentation made it so much easier. We proposed the idea to multiple administrators and the feedback was absolutely fantastic. Our objective was simply to raise money to buy toys, books, electronics, and etc. to entertain kids while they're in the hospital, whether it be for an extended stay or a one time emergency. The specific logistics were primarily to get the donations for the Amazon Wishlist from advertising and mainly getting money from sporting events. However, when we were done with the presentation, Mr. Cooper and Mr. Large suggested that we start a sort of donation competition between New Palestine High School and one of our county rivals, Greenfield Central High School. When I heard this idea, I absolutely loved it. What better way to stick it to Greenfield by helping kids with cancer? The idea of turning the donation into a sort of competition between schools was absolutely genius because the competition should raise the engagement tremendously. The real success of Pitch Day was after the presentation and during the back and forth between the students and the administrators. Other groups said they could help spread awareness and administrators were very supportive of the idea, likely due to the personal connection. Who knew the cancer card could be so effective? With great ideas and the possibility of helping so many people, I could not be more excited for this project. I have big goals and I feel like if we handle the spreading-of-awareness correctly, it could be a massive success.
Blog 2 Fantastic progress has been made since the first blog post, and in such a short period of time too! To start from the beginning, JC and I thought it would be a good idea to set up donation buckets at local business to get a steady stream of donations. To do this, we first had to call various New Palestine businesses to see if they would be willing to keep a donation bucket for people to donate. After calling multiple businesses, we got confirmation from New Palestine Vet, Celebrations Day Care, New Palestine Nutrition, Brew 52, Raggedy Dog Grooming, and Get Go. Now that we got the confirmation, we had to make the buckets and an information poster to go along with the bucket so people knew what they were donating to. Mr. Large said that the school had a large amount of donation buckets from Riley Hospital and that we could modify them to make it clear that it's for Peyton Manning Children's Hospital. We also made an information poster to go with the bucket. We then went to all of the businesses that gave us the green light and set up the buckets, so all that was left to do was wait for the donations to come in! About a week later, we went back to all of the businesses to collect the money! Because of all the foot traffic, we predicted that Get Go would give us the most and we were quite right. Considering the buckets had only been up for a week, I would have been extremely happy with 100 dollars from all of the businesses combined. From Get Go alone we got around 75 dollars. Looking into the bucket and seeing how full it was gave me chills. Knowing that all of that would go straight to kids in the hospital and potentially brighten their visit was a feeling I can't describe, especially with the personal connection of my brother being in the hospital so much with cancer. After collecting from all of the businesses we collected a grand total of $132.39! This was phenomenal for something that was just in the background. The next thing we did was work on that Donation War I mentioned in the first blog. Mr. Large connected us with two kids from the Greenfield Central service learning class so that they could advertise the Donation War at their school and we could advertise here at New Palestine. This did not go as planned however, and due to some technical miscommunications we only confirmed that we could do the Donation War the day before the game. Despite the lack of advertising, the event was still extremely successful. I very unfortunately could not make it because of a tennis match, but with JC and the two Greenfield girls being there and running the donation table the project was far from undoable. We made some posters and they went to the game and set them up. They ended up collecting a total of $345.09! That means with the first week of collections and the event, we've raised a total of $477.48! The project is going fantastic so far and I am super excited to see where it goes in the future.
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