Our Final Blog!We’ve finally reached the end! It has definitely been an interesting journey through these past twelve weeks. Luckily, we overcame many obstacles to reach our final product and produce some pretty impressive numbers. All in all we collected so much more than we had originally expected. This week we started on our final presentation which will be shared with the class on Wednesday, December 15th. We are done with the sorting and labeling through the donations we’ve received because luckily, they kept coming in until today when we decided to officially end it due to the project coming to a close. If we get anymore past the official date, we will still gladly accept and donate such as we are doing on Tuesday, December 14th. We have had donations coming from churches, schools, individuals, neighborhoods, and friends and family members. The majority of our project took off within the last few weeks of the time frame we were given, and to our surprise, we were not as pressed for time as we had thought we were going to be. We ended up having enough time to get donation boxes out, gather/label the donations, and keep up with the start of the final presentation and blog posts. The boxes Makenna set out at Hillsdale Church did rather well and brought in quite a lot of coats, gloves, hats, scarves, and even sweatpants.
Even coming to the end of the project we still faced some conflicts. We still had to figure out some coordinating with where to drop off all of our donations. We originally planned to leave the donations at Storehouse for Jesus. However, when trying to coordinate with timing, we couldn’t figure out a good time to drop things off with our schedules so we decided to change locations of donation. We decided on Just Hope in Mocksville, where donations are directly distributed to those in need, and the remainder is sold as thrift. Anyone in need can take what they need from Just Hope free of charge as a way to be there for these families and individuals. The profits from the thrifted goes back into helping out people in need for things like hospital bills, hotel rooms, food, clothes,etc to support people get back up on their feet. We are all so pleased with the final results and hope that our efforts made an effort to our community. Even though at times, things did get a little rocky, we are so proud of the work we did. I am excited for the final presentation and to hear everyone's thoughts on our project. Our emails are linked on the “How to get involved page” if you need to reach us with any questions, comments, or concerns having to do with the end of our project or donations! Thank you to everyone who helped with donations or planning! We could not have done it without the support we received!
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Blog Post #11! After eleven weeks, genius hour is starting to wrap up. Holy cow!! Our WInter Warmth Drive project is coming along quite well! We have gotten donation after donations from the churches, schools, neighbors etc. Everyone we have come into contact to is so nice, and giving. One lady in Oak Valley gave us over 41 coats. We all discussed that our project helps the community, but doesn't cost much at all. We think that this is partially the reason we are doing so well. People an cleanout their closets and get rid of the things that they are not using/do not need anymore and donate it to those in need.
Some families, such as my own ( Jenna ) have made it a tradition to do something good for others during the holiday season. Sometimes we donate money, or work at a soup kitchen, or participate in an angel tree. Not only are we personally taking the initiative to do something good for others on our own, but other people also get to feel this way. The winter warmth drive influenced families to do the same before this holiday. It is really nice to see that even though we had our struggles, we are exceeding our expectations and collecting SO much. We had to extend the end date, because we had donations every day. We are still in the process of organizing, sorting, and labeling the clothes into bags to get our statistics. We have sorted and labeled the clothes into - girl's coats -boy's coats -women's coats -men's coats -pants -mittens/gloves -hats -scarves - new socks - used socks - and even underwear?? Our community is so giving and kind and we could not have done it without them. Thank you to all who have donated and are continuing to donate!! Also special thanks to Mr. Barker, and Mr. Ferebee along with the Staff and students at North Davie! Week ten!! This week our winter warmth began. We are not expecting a lot because we started it so last minute. The donation sites are located in Mr. Barker's classroom, Mr. Ferebee's classroom, Hillsdale United Methodist Church, Makenna's house, and Jenna's house. We are hoping to collect a lot at the church and a lot from our houses. We are not expecting a lot from the school because we know that a lot of our fellow classmates will probably not going to want to take a lot of their time out of their day to go find winter gear to bring into school. We have decided to run the drive through December 9th. We are aware that genius hour will be pretty much over by that point by we want to give people lots of time to donate. This way we will able to collect more.
Over the past week, we have met up at Makenna's house to count up all of the donations to the sock drive. We ended up getting four big boxes full of socks. We were in complete utter shock with this because the drive only ran for 5 days at North Davie. We went through each box and end up dividing the proceeds in 4 trash bags. Two of which were new socks, and two were used socks. Makenna also got donations from her family all over the nation, such as Michigan, Ohio, and California. We are very happy with the end result of our sock drive. We are also super thankful to everyone who donated and helped us reach our goal!! Over the next two weeks, we will turn our focus to the winter warmth drive and hopefully we will be able to collect enough to keep a few people warm. We cannot wait to see how it ends up. Stay tuned for the results!! Week Nine!! This week has been a lot better than our previous weeks. To start off, Sarah went to pick up the sock drive box from North Davie and we ended up getting four full boxes of socks which is very surprising because the drive was very last minute! Our group is trying to figure out a time and place to meet to go through all of the socks and organized them into designated bags. We also need to make sure they are all in matching pairs. Makenna has reached out to her church and got the approval to do the drive at her church. It is planned to run through December twelfth even though week 12 is over next Wednesday, December eighth. We have decided that we will donate our collected items to the storehouse for Jesus. We are hoping that they will take everything.
Our biggest disadvantage of this is that we started this drive so late and we're worried about running out of time to get it done and to be able to compile a final presentation. We think that one of the biggest lessons we learned throughout this process was to not procrastinate. We would find ourselves saying that it was easy to organize and we could put it off till next week, which was most definitely not true. Getting in touch with outside resources and trying to organize something like a winter warmth drive, or a food drive is actually a lot harder than it seems. The hardest part was especially the suspense of waiting for them to respond. Obviously they have their own personal lives and are busy, so getting back to us was probably not very high on their list of priorities. Our group did not take this into account in the beginning of this project. This is definitely something we will have to take into consideration for the next project!! Genius hour is more than halfway through! We have definitely faced some problems and had to revise our plans. Midway through we changed our original plan from a food drive to a Thanksgiving food drive to help people in need during the holiday season. We ran into some difficulties by changing so quickly that unfortunately it didn't work out as we had hoped. The communication was a problem that was hard to get around since we needed approval from the schools to have a site there. There also was not enough time to get everything orchestrated. We are a little bummed that it didn't work out, but on the bright side socktober-tober was a success! We are going to pick up the socks Wednesday after school and distribute them as needed. Although we have not seen the results of Socktober, we have word that it was a success and that the students at North donated socks for us to use! Even though both of our food drive ideas did not go as planned, our original goal was to help out people in need and contribute to our community. With this being said, we are now aiming towards a hat and glove drive at Hillsdale United Methodist Church and Mr. Barker’s and Mr. Ferebee’s room at Davie in the upcoming week. There will be boxes in each room for students to donate winter hats and gloves starting next week. We have already reached out and confirmed a spot and date at the church for when this will be happening, which was a big flaw in our previous plans. Makenna is planning on being on the campus of the church this sunday and she will maintain the drive. The drive will run for two weeks and in our final week we will donate to Storehouse for Jesus. Hopefully this idea will work in our favor and we can donate socks, hats, and warm winter gear as our final product. We are so thankful for North Davie staff and students for donating and helping out our project! Make sure to check out our Instagram page and look out for the donation boxes in Barker and Ferebee’s room!
This week was just full of bad news. As you guys know, we have been planning to do a food drive since the beginning of this project. Our plan was to collect Thanksgiving food items at a few of the middle schools and at Davie and then donate them to either the Storehouse for Jesus or a different food bank. We have just received news that it is now too late to start any of this and our goal was unrealistic. So we are back to square one and are trying to think of ideas. We still want to keep the theme of giving back to the community and hopefully directing some type of drive. Our group has been discussing doing a hat and glove drive since the weather is getting colder and we want to provide families with something to help them stay warm. With this said, we need to be more efficient about getting in contact with sources that can help us set up donation sites. Makenna has been trying to contact her church and she is just waiting the approval from the pastor. We also want to have a donation sites in a few classrooms at Davie. On a happier note, we got our sock drive at North Davie successfully completed! Jenna and Sarah were able to bring the donation box to North and begin our first drive! We do not how many items we have actually collected because we have not gone to collect the box yet! There have been some doubts about this drive because we were not very prepared for it and we did not give anyone much notice so the profits from it will probably not be very good. However, we can use this a lesson to teach us that we need to people more aware of our plans and give them a longer notice. One last thing, We are planning on posting on Instagram soon, (whenever we get around to it) so if you want to keep up with our plans and updates, follow it!!! It is linked on our "How to get involved" page!!
WEEK 5! We are finally putting our plans into action! We have connected and reached out to the schools, and visited and revised our plans. Instead of doing just a food donation site, Sarah remembered how at her school they participated in a sock drive during the month of October, called “Socktober”. We have reached out and asked if we could hold it this year. We think this is a cool twist on the original idea, and it also contributes to the entire goal of the project: helping others. On Wednesday (10/27) we will start Socktober and it will run until next friday (11/5). This week in genius hour we are making posters for the Sock donations, making a google slide presentation for Mrs.McPherson at North to incorporate into her PROWL presentation, and writing the morning announcements for them to use regarding our drive.
We have also made a slight change in the original food drive plan - instead of collecting general food, we are focusing specifically on Thanksgiving foods! The holidays can be especially hard so hopefully we can help donate Thanksgiving meals to families in need. We are asking for:
We are excited to help out our community, and make it a little more personal with our revised plans! Socktober will hopefully be a hit and prepare us for the second drive in mid-november. Feel free to leave any suggestions or ideas you may have, and be sure to follow us on Instagram! Our first post will be coming out soon….STAY TUNED FOR MORE!!! This week we did get in contact with the schools that we will be having donation boxes at and have gotten a good start on coordinating where everything will be taking place. The locations that will be used at Davie were already verified so we didn’t have to worry about coordinating that this week. We didn’t get to post on Instagram, which we meant to do, so we should definitely get to do that this week since the donation sites will be verified.
I think we are all excited to see what the following weeks hold and to see our ideas finally play out. I know working with the elementary and middle schools is a fun element added to the project since we get to collect from the schools we used to go to. As our time to finish the project gets shorter, it does become a bit more stressful to make sure we stay on schedule and have enough time planned for each donation site to collect what it needs. Being now a third through the project, we are starting to get through the planning stage and having to work a bit faster. With that being said, I think we will have no problem getting it all done and having good results. Just like last week, we have a date set to get together and continue further progress on the project. As we said in our last blog post, time management for our group is our biggest and probably only large challenge as of right now. Keeping ourselves from procrastinating is something we are getting better at. With each one of us having busy schedules, finding coordinated time to work on the project can be difficult. We have done better about planning ahead of time though. Dates have been set aside for us to work outside of school on the project which is great news. Be sure to look out for updates on the website and on our Instagram account this coming week! Our emails are linked on the “How to get involved page” if you need to reach us with any questions, comments, or concerns!! This week was full of planning for our group! We focused on figuring out dates, locations, and plans for meeting to update donation sites and collect whatever has been dropped off. The Instagram page has been up and running for about a week and a half now and our plan is to start posting this coming week. Instagram should also be updated once the donation sites have been verified and are ready for donations. We talked to the teachers at Davie who’s classrooms we will be using as donation sites and should have those locations released when we set out donation boxes. Our plan is to contact the middle and elementary schools this week and set out the donation boxes sometime this coming week also. Overall, we are pretty much on track with our time frame and have a decent work pace. I think we are all excited to see the planning phase of the project come to an end and see it all come together!
Our biggest worry as of right now is staying on track as well. We think we are in a good place, but it is hard to gauge because we are new to this project. We are also struggling as a group to find the time to work on this project. Finding a time where we are all available is very hard because of our schedules. We are also struggling with this because of other school work that is prioritized before this, which is something we can all work on as far as planning and working together on. In fact, we are getting together tomorrow ( 10/11) and working on it which is super exciting! Be sure to look out for updates on the website and on our Instagram account! Our emails are linked on the “How to get involved page” if you need to reach us with any questions, comments, or concerns!! |
Authors:Jenna, Mak, Sarah Archives
December 2021
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