Do you have annual events that the congregation looks forward to? What is the most labor intensive fund-raiser your students love to be a part of? What is the wackiest thing you have done to raise the money needed? How have you been able to collect the funds to get your students to CHIC, Bible Camp, or on a mission trip whether overseas or within your community?
One of my favorite fundraisers was delivering phone books with my youth group. So, I guess this isn’t a particularly “helpful” idea for fundraising in the here-and-now as phone books are rarely utilized since Google and our cell phones can help us connect in the time it would take to hoist the phone book from the spot where it is stored. Anyway, my friends and I always looked forward to delivery time. Huge pallets of phone books would be delivered to the church narthex shrink-wrapped and waiting for us to cut in, line up and throw them in the church van. We’d pile as many as we could inside the van, and then as many as 6 or 8 of us would climb in too. This was not work for the faint of heart or the weak in stomach. Van-to-door delivery meant constant stops along the way and it meant raising enough money to get to camp or go on the mission trip planned for that summer.
In Unalakleet, Alaska, the youth begin raising support for the next CHIC within months of the last. Plates of spaghetti are served with smiles aplenty and a theme. The dinner is the talk of the town and the community looks forward to being in the church basement together and supporting the students. Momentum is high, the stories are still being told in regular conversation and without much (or any) prompting. They’re all still excited and everyone wants to go when they have their “turn”.
In your ministry, how do you get your students excited about attending CHIC and how do you help them to attend? What about Bible Camp or that trip through Merge Ministries? Perhaps you have a few events that have worked marvelously and a few more that bombed for one reason or another. Please, share with the rest of us your fundraising ideas!
