By: Lori Matthews, Lowell Home and School Association, Madison, WI
When I was a kid the word fundraising meant The Molasses Stir-Off, the annual community gathering where locals converged on John Stuffle’s farm to make molasses. Volunteers would strip cane, feed the stems into the press and skim the top of the bubbling brew as it made its way through the cooking troughs. There weren’t any proper carnival rides or games, but kids could pay a nickel to the library volunteers and take a “ride” on the huge wooden gate that separated the grazing field and duck pond. The gate would be pushed open with ten kids hanging on tight, and it would swing out over the edge of the duck pond and come smacking back into place with a thud that would make us shriek. There would be music—banjo, Autoharp, hammered dulcimer—from musicians perched across bales of hay on a flatbed truck. People from all over East Tennessee came to buy molasses with all proceeds going to projects in our own community—a new roof for the library, new trees to border the cemetery, donations to cover the unexpected needs of the elementary school when a fire damaged the building.
Fundraising has come to mean something very different these days, even in my hometown corner of the Appalachian foothills. My nieces and nephews sell subscriptions to corporate media magazines. My sister calls me to see if I’ll buy a $10 roll of wrapping paper printed in Taiwan so her son can meet his quota of 10 sales. And I’m asked to buy corporate produced popcorn—priced at three times the normal price of organic popcorn—all in the name of adding a few dollars to my nephew’s after school club. In schools and children’s groups, fundraising rarely has anything to do with community identity any more. Too often, fundraising is about organizing children and their parents into an army of salespeople representing out-of-state corporations to sell products made under exploitive circumstances in foreign countries—but sold in the name of creating much needed funds for schools. I think we’ve mistakenly turned the process of sincerely supporting our local organizations into something so far removed from who we are that we find ourselves forced to be untrue to our own sensibilities about the political power that accompanies the decision to make a purchase.
Today I live in Madison, Wisconsin, and for the last year I’ve served as a fundraising coordinator for Lowell Elementary School’s Home and School Association. I assumed this role accidentally, by suggesting that we sponsor a fundraiser using fair trade, organic coffee roasted locally by Just Coffee, a socially conscious enterprise if there ever was one. We hoped to sell 20 pounds of coffee a month between November and May, a total of 140 pounds for the year, which would add a projected $280 to the LHSA funds. Instead, in the first two months we sold 265 pounds. By the end of the year we had sold nearly 700 pounds of coffee, making over $2,500 for the school.
Why was the coffee fundraiser successful? With other parents, I think we’ve identified the elements that made it work for us:
1) We sold a high quality product that parents already purchased on a monthly basis for a price similar to the price charged in our neighborhood grocery.
2) Our parents care about and respond to the elements of fair trade, organic farming, and the support of a community business. We promoted these aspects of the fundraiser as much or more than the actual benefit to the school.
3) The fundraiser became connected with our identity. Our little school is comprised of 270 students from multiple ethnic and cultural backgrounds, 50% of whom live below the poverty level. Just Coffee’s fundraising model allowed us to create a label specific to us—The Lizard Roast pays homage to the school’s mascot, the lizard, and carries the word “coffee” in four different languages— unexpectedly galvanizing our sense of ourselves as one school community.
By the second month of the fundraiser I started getting questions from parents about what else we could sell that meets the same criteria, and Mike Moon, one of the owners of Just Coffee, supplied the answer—cheese. He advised me to call John Peck at Family Farm Defenders, and as a result, Lowell Elementary held its first cheese sale in early May.
With John’s guidance, we developed a plan to offer fair trade cheese, processed in Plain, Wisconsin, from milk produced by local small family farms. For prep work before the sale, John attended our Family Fun Night (dressed as a cow, no less) to distribute samples of the cheese. We created a flyer, sent home with each child, listing the varieties of cheese and offering tidbits of information about things like what makes Colby the texture it is and how to make baked Havarti appetizers. We combined the cheese order with the May coffee order, and we sold 113 pounds in our first month. The verbal response has been completely positive—parents wanting to make certain we intend to offer the cheese again next year.
And we do. We’ll be selling fair trade, locally roasted coffee and fair trade, locally produced cheese each month of the 2005-2006 school year. To take things further, we hope to make the sources of our fundraising a part of school lesson plans—creating a series of class speakers in areas of environmental stewardship and sponsoring field trips to working farms and the cheese processing plant. We want our fundraiser, which has already become about community identity, to stretch into actual education, thereby allowing us to invest something more important than money in this project.
For more info on how you can launch a fair trade fundraiser at your school,
Contact: Lori Matthews, 33 Farwell St., Madison, WI 53704 lmatthews@tds.net
