Tonight's picture was taken in February of 2004. Mattie was almost two years old. As you can see Peter caught us in real time..... Mattie fully on and me in the background exhausted! I have to say I had exhausting days trying to keep up with Mattie's physical and mental energy level. But I wouldn't have had it any other way.
Quote of the day: Individual commitment to a group effort--that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work. ~ Vince Lombardi
One of the things that makes Mattie Miracle work, besides our incredible donors, are our equally incredible volunteers. Some of our volunteers have been with us since the Foundation began in 2009. In fact, our core volunteers are people who helped us in indescribable ways during Mattie's 14 month battle.
Today, I had a 90 minute phone call with one of our dedicated volunteers. I have known Jane since 2005, when Mattie was in preschool with her daughter. Over the past couple of years, Jane has become more and more involved with the Foundation. In addition to being a significant donor, she also wants to help me find corporate sponsors for our Walk and is also reaching out to local businesses for raffle items. Ironically, it is Jane who taught me years ago how to solicit a local business for a gift in kind, as she was the solicitation chair of our preschool's auction. Back then I volunteered to serve on her committee and had the opportunity to learn some of the process.
Our Walk raffle is a big production as it requires solicitation of businesses, being organized, staging the items, selling the items and keeping track of sales. This is all on TOP OF THE WALK! Thankfully I have worked with our raffle chair, Carolyn for 9 years now. Carolyn is another mom I met through Mattie, as her daughter was in preschool with him. Seeing a trend here??? It always comes back to Mattie.
While talking to Jane today about corporate sponsors, she told me about a website called Pinterest. I have seen Pinterest pop up often on Google searches but never paid much attention to it. Well until today! Jane just finished up her school's auction this year and told me that it was Pinterest that gave her some great ideas. So literally while talking to her I went on-line to Pinterest and plugged in the search... "silent auction items." I couldn't get over what I was seeing, all great ideas!!!
So what is Pinterest? Basically it is a site where creative do-it-yourself'ers can go to post their ideas and finished products. You can search on the site using a keyword. In a way, it is like a person's virtual cork board filled with thumb tacked photos of their favorite creations. In any case, I am a visual person and I found this was a great way to get inspired to come up with novel raffle baskets.
What this also told me is...... there are MANY MANY others out there like me. I really thought it was the only one struggling to create and stage baskets for a non-profit. Wow was I wrong!
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