Today's Accomplishments: 16 May 2008

It's actually quite annoying what I learned today. What did I learn, you ask? Well, I learned that the chief fundraiser for our school basically doesn't want us asking for corporate sponsoring because she's afraid that we will interfere with what the school plans to do in the next six months (aggressively asking corporations for donations/sponsoring). This works against our cause, as fundraising a solid $150,000 is a lot more difficult than just raising say, $75,000.

Also on the note of fundraising, our group considered the addition of a PayPal donation box for The Strength of We (the organization that's going out to help people in Peru and other places around the world). This would help greatly as, if people feel greatly moved to help our cause, they could easily click a few places and donate to us. The problem with PayPal is that PayPal actually takes off a percentage off all donations, which is a big hindrance to us.

Hm, what else? In our group, Kit is still looking up various airlines that fly to Peru, in hopes of asking them for some kind of discount so that travel fares would be less, allowing the use of money towards actually building the medical clinic and helping the people of Peru. It would also be great if we could get the same kind of help from hotels and/or restaurants, etc. On a side note, if everybody in San Diego, more than 2.5 million people including kids, donated one cent everyday for one school week, our goal would be met. If we could get corporate sponsoring that would match us to an extent, the amount we could make would be amplified greatly. This just goes to show that the little people matter. The problem with this proposal is just getting the word out to everybody. It would be really awesome if radio stations, newspapers, online advertising (such as Craig's list), Myspace, Facebook, etc. could help us get the word out.

There's obviously a lot to be done within the next 3 or 4 weeks. I suppose next week, we should being getting the word out to people around our school to see what they think and if they have any kind of input on how we could go about raising the money. Also, we should begin calling up the airline companies, contacts in Peru, anybody that could help us minimize the cost of the trip so more goes towards the actual cause. On the note of calling people, we should also call or email PayPal to find out if they could deduct less or no money from donations.

Something that I hope I can collaborate on with some members of other groups is to get a website going for The Strength of We (if we can get the URL from Darrell, that would be great). This would be very useful for getting the word out because we could direct people to information about us much more easily.

150,000 Dollar Question

We have received our question for the project we are doing. It is as follows:

What can you do to raise $150,000 between May 15th, 2008 (tomorrow) and April 1st, 2009 in order to send 50 High Tech High students to Peru to build a medical clinic?

Though this might sound as though its just a project for a problem solving or economics class--it's really a lot more than that. We need to start the fundraising process. We need to begin to come up with the funds. Most of all, we need to have a plan.

First of all--the first step in that plan--we need questions. They are as follows:

• Who can we get involved? In the school? In the community?
• Which corporations could we get involved?
• What is the money for really (The clinic? The tickets? The hotels/meals, etc?)
• Where could we market this idea?
• Can we move past city boundaries?
• Who should we target? What's our audience?
• What is our timetable?

Starting right now, we're trying to come up with a way to raise that money. You can help. Give suggestions, opinions anything. If you want to donate, contact High Tech High and ask for Darrell McClendon.

Please, we want to help people in Peru!!