a few good pieces of news come along to cheer me up and since this blog is also a helpful reminder to us as to what all we have gone through in this crazy journey called 'non profit' I am going to document it. We have a deadline on raising the money we need for the micro loans. The marketplace will open, and our 300 people will need their money at least a month beforehand in order to gather their inventory etc... and we have to come up with how we are going to get the money in the door. When you think that 1,500 initial lives will be impacted in this first round of loans it's pretty overwhelming for two stay at home Moms trying to juggle saving the world and being wives and mothers.
Remember this post awhile back? http://ohfoundation.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-heart-of-generous.html
Well I get a call at the beginning of this week out of the blue from Amanda and she says, "Remember those rack cards you gave me about Open Hand?" (side note: every order she's been putting our rack card in it to tell people a little about us since she's donating money to our cause) I said, "Yeahhhhh" and she says, "Well I need like 500 to 1,000 more." To make a long conversation short for some crazy reason a really popular social website of some sort had a blogger who posted the most 'famous' picture of Amanda's cabbage patch kid hat and basically claimed she made it and she had people coming out of the woodwork wanting her to make them a hat. It was as if nobody had seen all the publicity that Amanda had gotten until one poster called out the blogger for 'stealing' the picture of Amanda's wig and claiming it to be hers and the poster linked to Amanda's etsy site, which just in case you or someone you know would LOVE a hat - here it is - http://www.etsy.com/shop/TheLilliePad?ref=shopsection_shophome_leftnav and Amanda tells me in this conversation that her etsy site has 'blown up' five times more than when her wigs went viral back in the summer. By this time I'm stunned into silence and also silently crying. It was a great sign that we are doing is still important and to not give up.
Then another fun thing - we are doing a ladies conference at the end of October and we are going to do goodie bags for the ladies and one of the things we'd like to give them is colorful scarves. A lady who used to be a buyer for a department store decided she was going to call them and see if they'd be willing to donate some. The manager says, "how many do you need." She says, "well we need a lot." and he says, "Will 600 do?" And proceeds to tell her to come in and pick out whatever patterns she'd like. (OMG) And then I have no idea how this went but someone contacted Alisha because her grandmother had died and she had 100 scarves she wanted to give us. What the heck!? So awesome.
So these are some things I want to remember when the going gets tough because it is always hard to get people to give money even though it is such a worthy cause.
We are getting into the final few weeks before the training begins for our 300 loan recipients so it's crunch time.
I'll leave you and myself with one final thing...
when you think about quitting
think about why you started in the first place
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