Thank you!

Dear everyone who donated, tweeted, shared, and/or passed along information thus helping us get the word out about our project,

First and foremost, thank you.  Our fundraising campaign has been a HUGE success.  Never in my life have I ever received such an incredible outpouring of support, and I certainly never expected us to hit our initial mark so fast.  But we did, and it took us less than a month to do it! 

I can’t even begin to fully express my gratification to everyone who helped out.  Whether you donated to the fund, passed along our message to perspective donors, shared our website on a social media site, or just told your grandma about it, your help lead to our success.  I am eternally grateful.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Unfortunately, Peace Corps has a strict policy of not sharing the names of those who donated through their website unless you specifically checked a box that said something along the lines of “It is ok to share my name with the Volunteer running this project,” so I cannot personally thank everyone who gave.  I apologize for that.  I do, however, have a list of 26 names and am writing you all electronic thank you notes, so if you did not receive an e-mail, but did in fact donate, it means you are not on the list I was given.  If you did donate through the website, but forget to check the box, please let me know.  Have no shame, I’d really like to give thanks where thanks is due.

Now for a funny/pitiful story on why the success of this fund-raising campaign means that much more to me. 

This was not my first attempt at fundraising.  During my junior year of college, I started volunteering at CUHelpLine, the on-campus Mental Health Support Hotline.  Our purpose was to provide confidential, non-judgmental, and unbiased support to CU Students, their parents, and the Boulder community in general.  We staffed phone lines seven nights a week and took calls on topics that ranged from simple stress to suicide.  It was an undervalued service, which was also severely underfunded.  Four months into my first year there, we came about this close to shutting down due to some confusion involving our grant from two years before.  The grant expired when we still had bills to pay, and we had no money to pay them with.

So I had this great idea:  Let’s ask the community for help!  I thought to myself, “With the service we provide, I bet they’d be more than happy to throw a few bucks our way and help us pay the rent.”  So I wrote a letter.  And then I edited the hell out of it.  I got input from my mom, my dad, my sister, my friends, and some of the other members of the organization.  I then walked down Pearl Street (the business hub in Boulder), starting at 9th, and wrote down the name of every single business that was currently occupying space until I ended up in the neighborhood past 15th.  I must have had about 150 names on my list.

I then took that list, and personalized every single letter I wrote so it read “Dear Illegal Pete’s,” or “Dear Hapa Sushi,” and stuffed it into a personalized envelope.  In the days that followed, I went back to Pearl and hand-delivered those letters to each of the businesses I had written down.  “That was easy,” I’m sure I said to myself, sitting back on a couch somewhere now expecting the money to flow in.  And then I learned an important lesson in economics, and how timing is everything.

The year was 2008. And I was living under a comfortable, financially secure umbrella my dad was holding over my head.  It felt good being oblivious to the world, carefree and unconcerned about the utter shit that was in the process of hitting the fan. And, in doing so, I learned that it is never a good idea to try and fund raising in the midst of a global financial crisis.  We ended up getting one donation: from my parents. It was pretty pitiful.   All that work and nothing to show for it.

Everything ended up being ok.  Even though we didn’t really raise any money, we didn’t end up collapsing.  Our incredible directors managed to keep us afloat by forming a partnership with the Health Center.  I doing so, they added us to their operating costs or something and we were able to receive a little funding to pay the rent and the phone bills.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I did take away something else from this experience: experience!  I was able to use this failure to learn. My second attempt at a large scale fundraising campaign was the opposite of my first attempt. Yes, the economy may be a little different now, but I think there are a number of other factors that influenced the outcome as well, lessons that I learned from that first failure became improved ideas for the second try.  I’m extremely happy with how things turned out and feeling honored to know I have such an incredible network who has my back.  Again, thank you to everyone for all your help and support.  I truly appreciate it.

Much love from afar,

Will