Landmines: Fundraising Campaigns

What schools are doing
Below are excerpts from email exchanges on our landmines discussion list about how classes around the world are raising funds to help demine schools.

I took part in this exemplary project with a group of 5th form (final year) students (19 female students aged 18/19) from the College for Occupations in the Service Industries Management (Hoehere Lehranstalt fuer wirtschaftliche Berufe) in Spittal, Carinthia, Austria. First part was to get to know the problem. In the English lessons we worked through the excellent material provided by your website. Then the students held presentations concentrating on the various aspects of this problem. The next step was to inform the public by special press releases, designing posters, and an interview which led to a bigger article in the regional Carinthian press... As one of the students in this class is a refugee from Bosnia, our school decided to organise a fundraising event in the name of this Austrianwide campaign, and to hand over the collected money to the organising Caritas director Peter Quendler. The final event took place on 24 June 1998. The 400 students of our school raised ATS 127,000.- ($ 10,000.- !) by donating themselves, collecting donations and by an auction of works of art by local artists and students. The money was handed over in a special ceremony attended by Bishop Egon Kapellari, local politicians and businessmen. There, a student from the class also presented the project "School Demining Schools". The students of Division Eleven (Heaven Eleven) have been busy! We’ve researched the landmines issue, organized resources, written speeches, and given 23 presentations locally (most to student and parent groups). As for fundraising, we’ve now raised over two thousand dollars ($2000.00) for the landmines cause! We are also selling t-shirts with our Students Against Landmines logo (one of our student’s creations), as well as newsletter subscriptions to our newsletter, Just One Step... We put together our own press kit and have been on local television and in the newspapers, and we’re looking to continue our efforts to help others. Happy fundraising! Mr. Baker and the students of Heaven Eleven (all 28 of them) Minnekhada Middle School Port Coquitlam, British Columbia Canada I am a Canadian teaching in Japan. Although my students are learning English as a Second Language, I have incorporated some of the facts from your Schools Demining Schools into my lessons. We have already arranged a landmine awareness day in our school for February 2 and are preparing a fundraiser to help schools in Mozambique. Tanya Binette 101 Coop Higashinakano Japan Hi from the grade 5-6 class at St. Peters in Trenton. We have been thinking about our fund-raising project and we have a couple of ideas to share with everyone. We are going to be selling bottled water at school after Christmas and we will also be raffling off a variety of items at Christmas time during our carol singing evening when our community is invited to visit our school for hot chocolate and cookies and Christmas music. We are counting the days until December 2! Eileen Conroy and her amazingly awesome grade 5-6 class Greeting from Grodno, Belarus. Living in Belarus we are facing a serious problem. We can raise funds by selling leather work, wood cut work, pictures and other articles which students make in the art workshops of our school. We can give several concerts for the parents and community. But we can’t send Belorussian roubles anywhere except our country. Belorussian money are not convertible and they can’t be exchanged in no other country. May be it is possible that we buy school articles and send them? Any other suggestions? With warm regards. Valentina Suvorina. School #33. Grodno, Belarus. We will soon be manufacturing (with our mechanics/engineering teacher at school) special "Campaign" key-rings bearing the "Schools demining Schools" logo copied from the UN web site. We’ll sell them for the project this winter. If it was possible, it would be nice to send some of you bags of key-rings...that would be real sharing. I got a few orders lately and, it has started a real technical/educational/trading/management/design process. We will be very proud to send you our simple school-hand-made key-rings. All this is tremendously interesting because so cross-curricular. It would be nice to start selling them before Christmas. You can see a photo of the key-rings at the bottom of my my personal page. I hope we’ll make loads of money to help get rid of some of those awful lethal landmines. Hugs to you all, people so far away from France. Warmest regards Brigitte Parry English teacher, Teacher trainer Lycée de Beauregard France Hi everyone! My class has raised $200.00 for the Demining Schools project!! We had a bake sale and it went extremely well. The kids organized the whole thing. They had a work schedule for both days. They baked all of the items at home. When they handed out baked items they also included pamphlets and other items about landmines ( postcards, pamphlets, bumper stickers, and other items we ordered from the U.S. Banning Landmine Campaign) We held our bake sale during parent/teacher conferences which really helped. Everyone was hungry!! We are really enjoying being a part of the demining project. My class has formed four committees in an effort to complete our part in demining schools. The committees are as follows: Action Committee, Organization Committee, Speakers Committee, and Community Rep. Committee. I will have each committee post a report so you can see the different jobs each group does. Everyone keep up the good work!!! Peggy Moses Prairie Park Elementary School Lawrence, Kansas, USA 6th grade Here’s what we’ve done so far for fund raising: every two weeks we have a special lunch (so far, we’ve had a Mexican meal, an Italian meal, a cook-out; we are planning a Chinese meal for later on). These have all been well-attended and we have raised between $120 and $160 on each occasion. People have been eager to come and it’s been a good experience for the 5 students in the group and myself , we’ve also become better cooks in the process! Wayneflete School Portland, Maine, USA I’m writing from Baldwin High School in Pittsburgh PA. My first semester International Relations class held a landmines awareness week program in January. During that week we raised 650 dollars for the project. Some of activities included a series of PSAs, educational display cases, fact sheets which were read by teachers to their classes, and a student written play & activity which was performed for some of the HS social studies classes & for our middle school. We raised the money by having a class competition to see who could raise the most money. Some students gave 10 & 20 dollars. It was very encouraging to see the students being so giving. We focused on young people helping other young people to achieve - the class thinks this made other students care. They made a connection outside themselves. Hope other schools are having successful programs. Thanks Victoria Machtay Baldwin High School Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA We are a class of 3-4-5 graders. We have been thinking and reading about the demining schools project since early in the year. We had a Bagel $ale in our high school hallway today to raise money for the demining program. The kids made posters to advertise, went to our local bagel store to find out about prices and what quantities to purchase and sold throughout the morning this morning! We are pleased with our efforts and feel really happy that close to Valentine’s Day we did something to help someone else! Vickie Weiss City School Grand Blanc, Michigan, USA John Hersey High School raised $450 through straight student donations for two weeks and free doughnuts for the home rooms from each class (freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior) raising the most money over four days. Barry Gadlin, English teacher Arlington Heights, Illinois, USA We’ve been discussing ways to raise $ for the Demining Schools project. We’re in the process of organizing an all day concert, where bands will play, maybe we’ll get a couple of corporate sponsors and we’ll charge for tickets. It’s huge undertaking, but the publicity and end $ return would be significant.The students think of it as a "Lollapolooza for Banning Landmines." We’re thinking of naming it SAM - Students against Land Mines or SLAM - Students Leading Against Mines. My Civics / Economics class has been busy raising funds to help demine the school(s) in Dombe. We are having a black-tie fashion show from which 1/2 of the proceeds will benefit the “Schools Demining Schools” campaign. Currently we have raised about $300.00 for Schools Demining Schools through two raffle ticket sales and students donating their change at lunch. We are also planning a big antique auction that should bring in a considerable amount of revenue. We have the local community and the school at large involved in this project. We’re proud to be part of the Schools Demining Schools team. Thank you, Patricia McKenna Upper School Faculty The Benjamin School Palm Beach, Florida, USA