I love living in a small English village, sure you’re miles away from anywhere and the weather is awful, but there is something special about the community here.
It’s amazing how everyone knows everyone, and everyone will help out if there is anyone in trouble!
Our old playground in the village was very old, and actually downright dangerous as some said! The slide had a puddle at one end, which made it completely unusable! The seesaw made a creaking noise when you used it, and there was only one swing seat left there!
After many village meetings we decided that something needed to be done, however we didn’t have enough money to put the problems right.
In fact as we later decided we should just rip the old playground out and fit a shiny new one! This would cost a lot of money to do, especially as it’s something that has to be done right. It’s not possible to cut corners on such a project!
This meant that we needed to find some ways to raise the £10,000 we needed for the state of the art playground.
Every week we had a meeting to discuss things that we could do, we spent a long time racking our brains to try and find a solution to our money problems, there were a lot of good ideas. However what we decided to do was choose activities that suit our aim.
We were planning to use the money on a playground, and so we decided to create fundraising activities that were mainly based around children. We did of course also use other forms of fundraising events, because we needed a lot of money!
We ran competitions, face painting, sporting events, and other interesting fundraising events! The competitions worked quite well, for example for younger children we had a drawing competition which cost £1 to enter.
We also ran a painting competition for older children, and held a talent show. Both of these cost £1 to enter.
We also had some success running sporting events, especially if we could get the teachers from the local schools involved! We had parent/teacher races where the kids could place bets on who they think will win; all the profits went to the playground!
Face painting was quite good, and while this didn’t earn that much money every little does help! We held the face painting at a bake sale that we were also holding to increase the money we raised. We also put on other events for children at the bake sale to make sure they were entertained!
It took us around a year to raise the money which isn’t bad going really, this meant that we could get the manufacturer out to fit the playground for us.
Within a couple of weeks all the children were having a great time playing on the playground! Fundraising can be a great way to do something for your community!
A new playground was the first thing of many that we did; now we fundraise all year round and simply save the money in case there is something that we think we should spend the money on.