How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?
Written by: Tracie Leistiko, FUNDrive® Market Associate, September 07, 2018
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice…and a whole lotta bags! Just ask Liberty High School Choir director, Robin Wood. Robin, along with her energized choir families, collected a mountain of bags for their FUNDrive®!
When the choir was invited to perform at the famed Carnegie Hall in New York, they decided to collect gently-used clothes and household textiles to help fund the trip. The choirs wanted to host two FUNDrive events, one in October and another the following February to raise funds for travel expenses.
The choirs were thrilled with the response from the community. They had filled up their performing arts center orchestra pit with an incredible 8,016 pounds of donations by June, four months before the date of their official event, and made their first delivery to Savers®, raising funds for the choir team.
They were off to a great start and continued to eagerly promote their fall FUNDrive. The freshly-emptied orchestra pit was ready for more. And oh boy did more come! By mid-August, thanks to community support, the pit was full again and Robin contacted the Savers FUNDrive team who were able to arrange an urgent delivery appointment – they loaded up the truck and the Liberty High team delivered another 9,385 pounds of donated goods to Savers, bringing their FUNDrive fundraising total to over $4,000 in less than three months and they aren’t finished yet! Within two weeks they filled the orchestra pit one more time and are storing all the additional bags that are being collected in the garage of one of the choir families. As this article is posted, they are looking to schedule another delivery so they have room to collect even more. If they keep up this pace, they might set a FUNDrive record for the state with their planned Fall FUNDrive drop-off in October. We have our fingers crossed for them!
So in a few months when they are standing in NYC and someone asks them, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”, they will knowingly respond, “Practice, practice, practice” AND an orchestra pit (or three) full of donations!