"The Foresters is one of the world's largest fraternal benefit societies; it offers an assortment of membership benefits and services, including life insurance, and investment products." (from a press release)
They are very active in community service and work on a variety of projects. According to a friend of mine, they were just given a quota this year for how much time and money they needed to raise in the community. While I don't think you'd get outright donations, they are doing things like running auctions for schools, getting low income kids ready for the new school year and other volunteer intensive projects. What they ask in return is to count the man hours and money raised toward their quota. I'm not sure, but they may just need a letter stating what they did for your school.
Ok first thing you have to do is plan out the way you want the carnival run and what type of games. Do you want a game in each classroom or just games in the gym. If you guys want to make 20k you gonna have to have a pretty big carnival. How many kids are at your school? Are you going to serve food? Will you give prizes at each game or run a redemption center? You can also do themed baskets...each class picks a theme, parents send in donations, all goes in a basket and is raffled off (we do tickets for 1.00 each and made about 1500 off of it this year). Then you need to do a layout, we also use one of the bigger rooms for all the preschool type games like duckpond. As far as food...you can ask local fastfood/resturant to donate their food (I know fazoli's does this), or you can ask local supermarkets for donations. Check out www.schoolcarnivals.com
its a great site.....has list of TONSSSSSSSSSSS of games and how to organize a carnival (all kinds of behind the scene info) As far as volunteers go...we run the carnival for 4 hrs and each is 30 mins shift. We assign a game to each classroom and have the headroom parents call their class parents and get 8-10 parents to help out. We also send out notices saying if you would like to volunteer to email us. We set up a carnival check in the day off so we know of any games not being covered. Call your high school also. Our hs kids have to do a certain amount of community service (for government and economics class)....also their National Honor Society's require them too. We say you have to be 13 or over to work by yourself.
I'm so glad you guys are excited! I've been freaking out since I found out this morning. The people who voted this in are NOT the people who will be working it or helping out. It will be left up to me to get the ball rolling and I haven't any idea where to begin.
I would guess that we will have about 25 or so volunteers, but won't really know until August. I will be checking the books and finances out this next week, so I won't know about the money we have to spend until then. We have no games of our own, unless you count board games like Monopoly, Scrabble, etc.
There is my info and everything that I know. Now what?
You're going to think I'm crazy but I have to admit I'm jealous. I would love to do a carnival. I've been researching games and booths for a few months now. In a couple years, I may even offer to do it.
I have seen lots of different ways to do it. Tell me when (month), what your resources are ($ and volunteer numbers and if you are allowed to have sponsors that advertise at the carnival?
No, I haven't been making up fantasy carnivals.
Hey, the Foresters (A national group) were just told they have to put in a ton of volunteer time so they would be great for extra hands. The group near us is almost begging for work.
I have other ideas. Give me an idea what you're looking for.
OHHHHHHH lord do I have tons of info for you. First of all do you guys have games or is that something you have to buy? We use a local mom/pop type group called "Kids Club Karnivals" they supply that games and prizes (redemption center) cash registers and massive other things and we only pay for the prizes we use (yes they are marked up more then you can get through Oriental Trading Company but we get everythign else free so it's basic even) The first time I did the carnival, being I had no clue, the best thing I did was call around to other local schools and got info/advice about how they ran theres. I've got this carnival gig down so if you have any questions feel free. We only make about 5k on our carnival and the only way I see being able to make 20k to replace is throwing a silent auction in. We're doing the same thing sorta..dumping the brochure sale and holding an auction instead with a real auctioneer. If you do decide to do the auction start asking for stuff now......if you wait to long everythign is gone.
