Fund-Raising
If charging a nominal club membership fee won't cover
your costs, or is out of the question, your club still has many different
avenues to seek financial support:
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If it's a school-based garden, ask your principal;
sometimes there is a discretionary fund that can cover a small garden budget.
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Or ask your PTO.
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Another alternative is to ask permission from school
officials to contact businesses which are your school's partners and seek
donations. See if you can put a small sign on your garden to thank them.
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You can try asking a garden-related business, such as
a plant nursery, landscaping company, tree-trimming company, hardware store, or
lawn service, for sponsorship funding.
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Or get your students into the entrepreneurial spirit
with the No. 1 fund-raising idea for spring: a car wash!
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You could also have your students sell plants and
bulbs in person, and online, through www.flowerpowerfundraising.com
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Another fun idea is to purchase flats of attractive
annual flowers, and go door to door in your neighborhood, perhaps as a group,
pulling them in little red wagons, and selling four-packs or six-packs for
twice as much as you paid for them, to raise extra capital. People may be
willing to pay a little extra since you went to the work of delivering the
flowers to their door, and besides, it's hard to resist an enterprising child's
smile!
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Students can mow lawns, rake leaves, plant bulbs, or
do outside chores for neighbors and friends to make some cash and do a good
deed at the same time. Always provide adult supervision and stress safety.
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If your students are really enterprising, you could
"share-crop" - the students make a business arrangement with various donors to
share in the future harvest, and the donors put the money up front. This is a
miniature form of the growing "buy local" style of food purchasing:
community-supported agriculture, or CSA. It puts extra pressure on the students
to make sure to produce a good harvest, but that's not all bad!
