It's been a busy week at work. Every year my company does a big campaign for United Way. We do the usual payroll donation program that raises about 25 million a year or so. But also each department does little fund raisers throughout the month of September to raise all kinds of money for a whole bunch of local charities.

In our building, it's the most fun we have all year. We do all sorts of things, anything from car washes to gift baskets to miniature golf in the lobby. Some groups serve nachos and ice cream floats. This year, we even had a "Kissing Booth" with Hershey's kisses.

So this year, I and a good friend of mine ended up in charge of the event for our whole floor. When you're paired with the wrong person, an undertaking like this can be sheer pain, but when you're matched up with someone who is fabulous, it can be pretty awesome.

She came up with a fabulous idea and we decided to run with it. It was an idea for a "can raffle". We had some seed money and we used it to buy a bunch of canned food. Then we took some prizes people had donated and put labels on the bottom of each can of food. The people would come and pay $1 for each can of food. Then they would get to keep the prize and the food would be donated to the food bank - genius huh?

We also had some other things going on. We sold some refreshments and made a few bucks off of that. We set up an inspiration station for people to write little cards and also set up a table with information about volunteer opportunities. It's funny, we've recently started a policy where the company gives you a couple of days a year to volunteer at local charities. I think it's fabulous, but it hasn't gotten a lot of press, so people didn't know about it. So we took all the info and printed it out on a little half sheet of paper. Then we rolled it up and fastened it with a label that said "Shhhh, I've got a Secret". We were going to just give them away, but then we thought we would get a little donation out of them for it. It was hilarious. We had people paying as much as $5 for this little rolled up piece of paper. Curiosity is a wonderful thing.


We were there for about 4 hours and we ended up raising nearly $600 in cash, food, and clothing donations for our local food bank. That's not bad in my book! And we had a lot of fun. We had people coming back two and three times because they wanted to win the prizes so badly. It was hilarious!


Now I can't wait until next year!



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