My team chose to donate to the organization Give Kids The World. After hearing the representative speak about them and reviewing their tax forms it was clear that they were truly an amazing charity who we would love to help. My group has raised $100 that we will donate to the charity next week. I’ve never donated to charity before so this is a brand new experience for me.  I hope to deliver the money with my group and I can’t wait to see the expression of the person. I think knowing I’ve helped will definitely be a life changing thing for me and make me want to help more.  As for working in a group, it was pretty nice. I think it definitely made things a lot easier and we didn’t really disagree on anything. I’m really looking forward to delivering the money next week.

      It is important to create a purpose, vision, and mission statement so you know what you have to do and everything is clear. It also pushes you to excel because having a mission statement is like setting a goal for yourself and that just makes you want to reach that goal. My teams purpose is to serve our community by supporting family services. I believe that whomever we help will be truly appreciative and this will only make us want to help more. During the course of this next week we plan to start contacting the different organizations whether that be calling them or emailing. I’m not quite sure what to expect as I’ve never done anything like this before but I hope that they will be interested in the program and willing to come speak with us.

During the brown paper bag activity I learned that each of my teammates are very different in the sense of what they like and what they use to describe themselves. I personally found it very hard to select just 3 items to put in my bag that were meaningful to me. I selected a playlist live ticket and headphones because music and the Internet take up a big portion of my life and are really a simple way to describe me. My last item was a small art set that my sister ha bought me, I chose this because I’m in love with art and I hope to be creating art in the future as my career. As my team showed their items each of them seemed so passionate and connected to them. As for fundraising we had planned to do bake sales, and other small ways to raise our money

This past week we had several different speakers from organizations visit our class and tell us about their job and the company. Our panel of speakers was on the slim side on Tuesday, having only two people. Both the Give Kids The World and Best Buddies representatives had a lot to say and were very enthusiastic about their charity. They told us what the money is spent on, what they do, and their personal opinions on the company. On Thursday, with 5 new charities visiting there’s wasn’t as much room for questions since the speakers had to compete for the floor. Speaking to all these different representatives really showed us a different side to the charities besides the numbers and spending. Each person was so passionate about what they do and what their company does, they even had a few of us in tears with their stories of who they’ve helped. Not only will we use the numbers of the tax forms to influence our decision on a charity but also the time we had to interview someone experiencing the charity first hand. Regardless of what which organization we choose we are going to be helping great organizations

This past week we looked over our different organizations and reviewed their 990 tax forms, we took specific pieces of information and put them together to create an overall score for the establishment. We selected these numbers to see exactly where the money was going, if it was all given to people who need it, to workers, and how much money it costs the organization to make one dollar. While the numbers of the tax form may have looked great the scores did not always reflect the same way. This is one helpful method that can be used when determining which organization to choose. While that is important, it is also important to view the organization and its workers on a more personal level. Volunteering or talking to the workers is a great way to find out if the organization is really as great as it seems, you want the people involved in the charity to enjoy what they’re doing. I think speaking to the representatives this upcoming week will really help influence our decisions when it comes to selecting our charity. We plan to ask as many influencing questions as we can in hopes to receive helpful and passionate answers.

This last week we looked over and reviewed tax forms on each of our organizations. A 990 tax form shows us the organizations income, budget, and much more. We plan to analyze these forms and eventually move onto to choosing the organization which we think is right. In my group we each selected one main organization to focus on and each researched that specific one. We learned that while some of our choices had very good incomes some were not doing so well.

It is important to look over the numbers of the organization before choosing a final one because we need to be absolutely sure that we are confident in helping out our choice. While any help to an organization would be great, I believe that helping one who maybe doesn’t have as large of income would mean so much more. Not only would the charity greatly appreciate it but so would the families who we helped. We plan to soon begin contacting our charities and finding out more information to help with our selection.

Being my first experience with the MAD cards I wasn’t sure what to expect, there were so many amazing options to choose from and so many important charities and I found it very difficult to narrow it down to just 6 but even harder to pick my top 3. I based my choices off of personal experiences and things that related to me. Not only this but I also chose my cards based on how I thought helping these charities would impact the community. It seemed as if almost everyone used this same thought process. As we read our top 3 cards aloud I realized that a lot of the class had very similar cards, but everyone had very different reasonings for their choices.

Some seemed so passionate about the ones that they picked and I feel like this project will be a really good way for us to bond and see into eachothers lives. This really interested me, the fact that we can all be so similar with our interests but at the same time be different. I can’t wait to continue on with this project and learn to appreciate and help others more than I currently do.