This week in Main Street Philanthropy our group made a decision on what charity we wanted to donate to. Our group, The Wonderful Warriors, decided to donate our money to Stars and Stripes Honor Flight. We thought that non-profit organization was pretty interesting and we all wanted to help veterans. I think with our t-shirts we should of had them pay us right away and not make a google form because it was too hard to collect money from people. Hopefully our shirts come later this week or next week so we can get our money from some people that still haven’t paid and then be done with our fundraiser.

This week in Main Street we had our last panel discussion.  I think it went pretty good. We had the VFW come in and talk to our group. I thought it was pretty cool to hear about their organization. Our group still hasn’t figured out what organization we wanna choose because they are both very neat and do good things with veterans.  We started selling out t shirts and sent a google form out to everyone at the school and we raised over $468 dollars. I think that we will probably do honor flight but we still need to talk with a couple others about the final decision. We hope to get more money raised to go to the good cause.

This week in Main Street we had our first panel discussion. I thought it was pretty cool how they opened honor flight to Vietnam vets and other vets. Something that surprised me was that he said they only do like 5 flights a year. I thought it would be more around 6 or 7 because there are a lot of people on the waiting list. But it does cost a lot of money so I see their point on why there are not that many. Our fundraising hasn’t started yet but we switched from doing bracelets to t-shirts and they are gonna be pre-ordered so that we don’t end up with extra shirts. Overall I think we will do pretty good with raising money because we are gonna try to sell them in a lot of locations. But we don’t know how much yet.

This week when Main Street Philanthropy came we made come calls to try to fill in dates to do panel discussions. We were also talking about how we were going to do our bracelets. We looked at ways to evaluate investments in a company too. I learned that you really have to look at the number carefully in order to make a smart investment it the company you wanna do. When we had to do our own tax forms I did Honor Flight and they scored a 13/15 on the grading scale. It says that they should be open for 28 months which is a super good score. I think this is the most important thing to do when looking into a company. The places we wanted to help we already knew they would have good scores from the people last trimester that did it. Overall it’s easy to evaluate the non-profit organizations

This week in Main Street Philanthropy we talked about tax forms and by looking at them how important they actually are. The tax forms make it easier for us to choose an organization because if they don’t really profit as much as we want them to for every dollar they get then obviously we wouldn’t pick them because we would like as much money as possible to go to our organization. You wanna make sure they they have good numbers, then once we pick our organization then we will start to get a hold of them and have our panel discussions.

This week in Main Street Philanthropy we started planning for our fundraiser. We made the purpose, mission, and vision statements to help us find our purpose of our group and what we wanna do. I was pretty interesting to think about why we are actually doing this. My group cares a lot about the veterans so we were all good with the plan.  Once we get everything done and out there then we can tell people why we are doing it and our goals so people will wanna buy things from us. I feel like people dont wanna buy from you just because, they wanna buy from you because they would then know after you inform them that it is going to a good cause for the veterans and any donations and or purchaces from our sales can help. I am also looking forward to calling the organizations because I think that we will find a perfect match to the one we all wanna do. I think all the people we have come in will be super nice because they volunteer their time at those places. I am looking forward to talking to these people.

I think the brown paper bag activity was very interesting. I learned that almost everyone in the class had something with their family in the bag, whether it was nieces, brothers, sisters, parents, grandparents, etc.  Some people also had things like hunting and music related things. I also learned that people are very different, nobody had all the same things. I thought it was pretty cool to get to know things about people that I had no idea was even something they would enjoy or even like. My group also chose to help veterans. We were thinking about doing a bake sale and making bracelets and selling them. We thought about doing this at lunch or other times that can work for us. Overall week 2 was very successful.

My experience using the Make A Difference (MAD) cards was pretty overwhelming. I learned really quick that I couldn’t just pick 6 of the cards and then narrow that down to 3 of those 6. All of the cards were important and they all should be cared about.  I think it was easier for most to pick their cards because they had that compassion for it. This also showed me more about the other kids in my class and what they think is important. I hope to get a better view point on all these awareness’s and see how we can all make a difference in the end.