Help-a-Thon

After seeing how successful our Compassion Week was, my group of friends and I wanted to find another way to give back to our school. With the budget cuts in California, public schools are losing a lot of money very quickly and my friends and I decided we wanted to raise money to give it directly back to our high school. One afternoon, I was looking aroung on iSpot to get ideas about what we could do and I saw the Help-a-Thon instructions. After watching the helpful video, my friends and I were sure we could make this happen!

A group of 3 of us met with our principal to share our ideas. We wanted to ask each class to participate in a school-wide Help-a-Thon where we'd all do community service and send letters out to our friends and family memebers asking them to donate money directly to our school for evey hour of community service completed. Each class would be responsible for coming up with community service ideas and working together to complete their hours. The principal love our enthusiasm and said she'd be happy to meet with the teachers to create a school-wide Help-a-Thon week. She also said that she could give the class who raised the most money an ice cream party!

Since we had the idea to do this, she asked us to join in on the meeting with the teachers. In this meeting, we pitched our idea and even suggested a few activities, like picking up trash and cleaning up our campus, doing a beach clean-up, and volunteering at a soup kitchen. We suggested that the theatre and music classes could hold performances while the advanced english and math classes could hold free tutoring sessions. The teachers loved our ideas and were impressed with how organized we were (as the Hel-a-Thon guide suggested, we carefully took notes). We came up with the idea to have a media person (I volunteered!) who would take pictures and videos throughout the week.

After the Help-a-Thon was over, I wrote an article about it in the school newspaper, posted the pictures and videos on the school website, and sent all of that information to the local newspapers...We made the front page! The best part is that the week was a lot of fun and a lot of kids got involved and got creative with their community service. We raised a ton of money for the school and MY class got the ice cream party! This was all so much easier than I thought it would be, especially since I had some awesome friends to help me out and a principal and great teachers to support and guide us. The principal said that she wants the school to do this every year!