NEADS clients have always shown great dedication and commitment to fundraising for the organization, and often clients come up with amazingly creative, and unique, ideas that help them get to that seemingly elusive fundraising goal.

This month I’d like to share with you two of those ideas that Assistance Dog clients have successfully used in the past.

First, we have a walk-a-thon that was organized by a client and also written about in an article in the local paper.  The client, Kelley Kennedy, was able to send letters and emails home to each parent asking for a small donation, and many of those parents passed the donation ask along to relatives too.  This event alone brought in over $7,000. The school also made and sold T-shirts to raise even more money for NEADS.  This event occurred in 2017, so it was held on school premises, but this type of fundraiser can be tweaked to work even in a virtual format.  Students can run, walk, skip, dance, swim, etc. and raise funds while doing it from their very own neighborhoods.

Our second fundraising highlight comes in the form of a coin drive at a local school.  Kristin Moffat organized a week-long coin-war which consisted of classrooms competing to see who could collect the most money.  Kristin and her fellow colleagues even managed to incorporate some lesson planning into the drive, which allowed students to not only collect the funds but also to count and manage them.  What a fabulous idea!  You can view the newsletter that Kristin put out to announce the results to the school community here.