"Tryin' to make a dollar out of 15 cents"... Connecting Students to Resources

  I tell people that the students I work with at Robert E. Lee High School are the funniest kids anywhere.

Even the most routine conversations are comical.

A few years ago, we were helping kids raise money to go on our annual Young Life fall weekend trip. Here is how a conversation played out with one particular student.

Me: How is fundraising?
Student: Not good, C! I made minus five dollars ...
Me: Minus five dollars? 
Student: Yeah, the only lady I asked ended up asking me for five dollars!!!

While that story remains one of my favorites, the truth is we've had success with fundraisers. This week, we're doing a Lee High stadium clean-a-thon to help kids pay for our 2013 Fall Weekend Trip.




The fundraiser is really simple:

Students must:

1. Agree to clean clean up the football stadium for 30 minutes or so after Friday night's football game. (We try to pick things that benefit the school).
2. Try to find 12 sponsors that will give them 10 dollars each for the clean-a-thon.

Not only does the fundraiser help kids with the financial aspect of paying for camp, we help them learn three important lessons.

•  Students have more resources than they think. So often kids see the price tag and believe they can't attend because they don't have the money in their piggy bank.  While they may not have the money in their bank account, they may have the resources to go get the money if they think creatively. 

• You have to have some ambition in life. There will always be road blocks to success, but that doesn't mean it's time to give up. You have to find a way above, under, around or through the road blocks in life. Our hope is that as they raise their money for camp they see that they can find ways through other road blocks to success as well. 

•  No one should be more invested into your success than you. At Young Life, we NEVER want to the reason that kids don't go to camp to be a financial one. And, in some cases, we help kids cover the cost. However, our first aim is to always to have a student invested in his or her own trip so that the student can learn lessons on being successful in life. 

There are plenty of other ideas out there for connecting students with resources, including a Urban Youth Workers Institute talk given by Kitty Fortner entitled 10 Proven Ideas for Fundraising Beyond the Car Wash. You can listen here. 

Chris Lassiter is a Christ-follower, a husband to Emily (read her guest blog here), and a father to five wonderful kids. He's written for The News Leader, HipHopDX.com, Rapzilla.com, Young Life Relationships and other publications. Recently, Moody Publications just published his first book, You're Grounded, which you can read about here.