Our event finally was completed!!!!!! On February 10, we had our dress drive, and it was EXTREMELY successful. The night before, we spent almost four hours setting up. This included putting up amazing decorations and moving all of the racks out of our dress room. We had awesome volunteers, and we were there for about 5 hours! After that night, I was so ready to have the event begin!
The next morning, Ivey and I arrived about a half hour earlier than the other volunteers with our coffee in hand, of course! We worked on moving the racks to a little bit more precise areas on the floor, and then, we started rounding up the volunteers for instruction on jobs. When all of the volunteers had arrived, we met in the center of the school and went over what the jobs were going to be. Each volunteer was in a group of three, and they were paired to each of the customers that would later arrive. Even before the doors were opened, there was a huge line of people waiting outside ready to come inside to shop! It was so exciting! When the doors opened, the customers all came inside, and from there, it was great! I ended up working in the wedding area - helping people choose a dress and try things on, zipping up their dresses, picking out dresses for them. I had a very successful experience. As the day went on, we just kept selling dresses, and it was really awesome. The event was actually a very positive one, and it worked out very well. After the event, we had to clean up the racks which was a long, tough process. After the long, hard day, though, it ended up being a great experience, and we have earned over 6000 dollars! It was a great day, and Ivey and I are very, very proud of all that we did! It was bittersweet to let the project end, but now, I'm ready to see what the rest of the year holds! Today is the day before the dress drive. We have one more night to prepare for the event. Over the past week, we've been continuously organizing the dress drive. The rooms are looking SO much better, and tonight, we have to move the dresses out into the hallway and decorate with Valentine's day decorations. Tomorrow is going to be great! We have all of our volunteers ready to arrive early in the morning. We also have to give assignments tomorrow morning. Tonight after our final organization, we will be ready for the event tomorrow. I am so excited for what tomorrow holds because I know it's going to be great! We have all the dresses looking pretty and ready to be sold to some great people. We also have an auction for tomorrow and many other fun activities for the people who come. I'm so excited, and I can't wait to see how it goes tomorrow!
This past week, we did a lot of work collaborating with our contacts at Doe Creek. We were discussing more about the actual process of the date. This process is going to include personal shoppers, vendors, a silent auction, concessions, and of course, the selling of the dresses. We have a goal of getting a lot of volunteers to help the day of as well as the Friday before Feb. 10 to help setting up and running the event. We also got another donation of wedding dresses scheduled for next week. We are trying to contact another prom dress store; however, they aren't getting back to us right now. Hopefully, we will get another donation of prom dresses and another of wedding.
Now, we are going to focus on advertising and getting people to the event as well as getting donations from the high school students. As the event grows closer and closer, we are getting excited and anxious. We want this to be a great event, and now it's just a couple more weeks of advertising as much as possible and organizing the room of dresses. As we have been moving on in our work for our prom project, we entered into a different side. We have been trying to get in contact with different local high schools around our school to try and encourage students to donate their old dresses and formal wear. So, we dropped off boxes at two high schools so far. One was extremely excited to get involved, but the other was a little bit more hesitant. We will be keeping in touch with them throughout this process to see how they are doing. Other high schools have been harder to get in touch with though.
Next in our process, we are going to continue to try and get connections with people willing to donate. Hopefully, we will be able to more wedding dresses since we are lacking in that areas. However, on the side of prom dresses, we have a very good amount. We have opened our boxes that were sent from Peaches, and we got an extremely large amount of quality dresses. We also got generous donations from a local prom store called Stephens. They sent us amazing dresses and were so so helpful with the process! For the next week, we are going to try and keep advertising our project and getting people to donate dresses or even to be interested in coming to the event. The business side of our project is going quite well with all of the opportunities we have gotten for donations. However, since we have been so busy, we kind of missed out on our service side of the project. So, I'm thinking maybe within the next few weeks, we might be able to find some way to incorporate helping other people specifically with our project. I hope to find some people who can really benefit from our event and then find a way to help them specifically. Until then, though, we will continue with what we are doing - organizing the dresses in the room, advertising, emailing, asking for donations, etc. - and our project will continue progressing. These past two weeks have been crazy busy for my new group, my old group and I. I joined in on a new project with Ivey, Mackenzi, and Emma. We had this idea to maybe work with underprivileged high schoolers and give them a prom experience. In order to do this, we met with some people who are in charge of the dress drive at the middle school - to try and connect and get these girls dresses. When we met at the middle school, we ended up also taking on an active role in the dress drive by trying to promote it, working it, organizing it, and also trying to get donations. We were very excited to take on this side of the dress drive as well. Later in the week, we met with The Graduation Academy in Indianapolis. We were trying to get in touch with them to get some girls that we could meet and hang out with and build relationships with so we could offer them a prom experience later in the year. The meeting took a different turn than expected - we were going to join forces with them to help with their prom and then they could help us with various community service opportunities. However, this isn't really what we wanted to do for our "Crossing Cultural Boundaries" part of our project. So, at this point, we don't really know how that part of our project will continue. The next week, this last Wednesday, Mackenzi, Ivey, and I went all around the north side of Indianapolis to try and promote our dress drive and get people to donate. We handed out fliers to managers and store owners and told them all about what we were doing. We plan to contact them again sometime when we get back from break. Nancy's Bridal was very interested on Wednesday and was ready to donate right then! We ended up getting quite a few dresses from them, and we have another bridal superstore that is going to donate up to 75 dresses to us in January. When we get back from break, we plan to keep promoting to the high school, and we are going to try to get more donations from other high schools and our own high school. We are so excited to keep working with the dress drive, and we hope to get even another layer added when we decide what to do about "Crossing Cultural Boundaries". |
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February 2018
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