FUNdraising

Our idea of fundraising was asking people to give us money and that felt so selfish to us.  We know that what we are doing is a great thing, but we also needed money and hated the thought of asking for it.  We put it off for a long time and just thought that we could just "do it on our own" or wait for the adoption credit from the government (HA!) which we don't know if it will still be available.  After talking with godly friends and our wonderful community group, we realized that God has placed a GREAT group of people in our lives that love us and wanted to get behind us to help us raise the money we need.  When we told them about our hesitation of asking people for money, they said, "We'll be doing the asking!".  Why yes, yes, they would and that brought rounds of laughter and a burden lifted from our shoulders.  Soooo.....

...we have decided to start doing some fundraising and God has already started blessing us before we've even begun! We received $500 one Sunday from someone anonymous and then we received $3,000 from a friend that is going to be used to match funds through our fundraising!  GOD IS SO AMAZING!!

Our first fundraiser is a Premier Jewelry Show.  My friend is a consultant for Premier and makes 50% from her shows and is graciously giving us 100% of those proceeds for our adoption fund.  It will be held on Tuesday, March 19 from 7-9 pm in her home.  We, of course, are hoping for a great turnout.  There's also a special deal going on until March 28 with Premier.  If you spend $75 then you will be able to choose any item in the catalog that is $50 or less and get it for $10!  Catalog sales also count in this deal!  I am excited to see what God is going to do with this fundraiser and at the same time help my friend with her new business.  Thankful for my mother-in-law Joy Kelley who will be showing the catalogs to her friends in Guam! We mailed it off today and can't wait to see how many sales we get from that! We have an event set up on FB here if you are interested. My friend came up with a pretty sensational tag line for this fundraiser, "BLing Calvin Home". Haha!

Our second and ongoing fundraiser: Baby Bottle Drive.  We are going to be purchasing baby bottles which we will give to friends and family and have them take them home to fill with change. They will then bring back the filled bottle and get another one to fill if they would like.  They are welcome to take home several if they so choose.  We will put a half sheet in each bottle telling a little bit about ourselves and our adoption story.  We've come up with a pretty catchy tag line (we think so anyway!) "Fill a Bottle, Change a Life".  I will post a more specific blog with details about this fundraiser in the near future.

The third fundraiser is a garage sale.  Bolivar, MO will be having their city-wide garage sale on Sat., April 27th.  We are asking people to donate their junk unwanted items for this garage sale.  We'd like bigger items like furniture and/or TV's since we can make more $$ with them.  But we will take all donations.  Whatever we don't sell at this one, Willard (where we live) has their city-wide garage sale in June.  We will again ask for more donations and use what we didn't sell in the last one for the Willard garage sale.

We have some more fundraising ideas, but so as not to overwhelm you or make this post longer that it needs to be, I will blog about them as we get them set and have more details.  We are excited about where God is leading with our fundraising and can't wait to see how much more he will be blessing us through this. If you have any ideas, feel free to post here or send me a message on FB.  Thank you for walking with us through this journey.