Organising a fundraiser

As part of our Term 4 inquiry, we have been discussing ways we 'can make a difference' in the lives of the orphans at Brighter Future children's home in Bistachap, Kathmandu, Nepal.

Underpinning all learning at school are the "Key Competencies" - the capabilities for living and lifelong learning.

Imbedded within the learning experiences of this Term 4 inquiry ""Orphans in Nepal", are the key compencies of "Relating to Others" and "Thinking".

Learning is the active process of connecting ideas, practising skills, and applying competencies in new situation. In the following description of what we have been doing over the last couple of weeks, you will see how the students in Room 7 have been connecting ideas, practicing skill and applying the competrencies of thinking and relating to others, while organising a fundraiser.




One afternoon we role-played some scenarios to find out whether it would be better to send the orphans ‘things’, or whether it would be better to send them ‘money’. After our role-playing, we realised that we didn’t really know what the orphanage needed to make life better, but if we sent money, then the orphanage could decide what was needed.

Having decided money was the best thing to send, we decided to fund-raise. Firstly, we talked about the different types of fundraising we could undertake:
• Passive fundraising (i.e. donations, coin trails, etc…)
• Commercial fundraising (i.e. selling biscuits, bracelets, etc…)
• Sponsorship (i.e. rubbish collecting, no TV week, read-a-thon, etc…)


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We formed ‘fundraising groups’ of 3-4 people per group, and brainstormed all the types of fundraising activities we could think of. We then, through a process of ranking, chose our ‘top three’ choices. Each 'top three' idea then went through a Yellow Hat/Black Hat process of unpacking the positives and drawbacks of each idea. Once this had been completed, each group went through a process of establishing concensus and decided on it's preferred fundraising idea.

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The next stage was to begin planning the 'how to...' aspect of running a fundraiser.
Questions such as "What do we need to make this happen?" "What jobs will there be to do?" "Who could help us?" "What questions do we have?" gave each group a starting point for discussion and co-operative exploration of the task in front of them.

Over the next week your child should be able to explain to you what their group's fundraising idea is, and how you can assist your child with their responsibility within the group. It's important that each child take responsibility for completing any jobs they have been assigned, as this develops their sense of 'collective responsibilty' for the group result. However, we can all assist them in small ways by listening to their questions, and offering assistance when and where needed.

I plan to update this post next week, when the class is a little closer to running the fundraisers.