Here, Carissa explains how she organized her activity in her own words:
For my organize an activity, I decided to make tie blankets and collect tie blankets from willing friends to donate to the Alexandra House. Originally, I wanted to do a bake sale to raise money that would go towards a scholarship at my school in the name of a friend of mine that passed earlier this year. However, as time went on it become apparent to me that I was not going to be able to do a bake sale easily due to Covid restrictions and such. After thinking about it with my mom, I decided upon making the tie blankets…While money can do a lot of good, I’m 17 and so are most of my friends, so we don’t all have a lot of money to spare. Something a lot of us could do though is afford to spent $20 on materials at JoAnns to make these blankets. In total, I received 18 blankets and made two myself. If I were to have been able to raise say $200, it could only help a few people there. Whereas 20 blankets will be distributed to 20 different people, which in turn is helping more people, and doing more good. Earlier this semester we discussed the eight maxims for making a difference. Maxim six says stay open to complexity. I definitely had to do this throughout my project. I had a few people say they were going to make blankets, but ended up getting sick with Covid so they were unable to do so. I had to figure out where to pick up blankets from people, and how to do so safely. I had moments where I really worried if this project would actually turn out well. In the end though, being able to be flexible helped me out a lot.
Interested in organizing something similar? Here are Carissa’s tips for YOU:
- Take pictures! I unfortunately did not take pictures while I was making the blankets and I regret it a lot. It’s important to have documentation of your project
- Contact your friends and family. My friends were the main people who helped me even make this project possible. They can help your donation grow exponentially.
- Know your boundaries. For the future students taking this class, if you’re still living in a pandemic as we are now, know what you’re comfortable with. My original plan did not work out because I realized I was not comfortable coming in contact with a lot of strangers. Figure out what risks are posed, and how you can go about them.
- Contact the organization that you’re donating to. See what they are in need of, and how donations work for them. For the Alexandra House I had to schedule an appointment to drop off the blankets, they didn’t allow random drop offs.
- Donate to an organization that you feel passionate about! It’s so important that you care about what the organization is doing, and it gives you so much more motivation for doing your project. My mom is a survivor of domestic abuse and she works on the board for the Alexandra House. This made it really important to me to be able to help them out as much as I possibly could.
Here is the link to Carissa’s video!
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