Chicks On Lit discussion

Last year this didn't happen and it is one of my biggest regrets. I loved that we did this the first year and so wanted to do it last year but life got ahead of me and I didn't get this done. However, it's a new year and I am excited to do this again.

I'm not sure how many of you have read Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, if you haven't I highly recommend it. It is eye opening, inspiring and heartbreaking all at once.
Through Halftheskymovement.org I found a lot of great charities that are legit and do the most good for women. I would love love LOVE to be able to do this Flock of CHICKS!
Some ways I thought we could do this are

1) the cookbook idea. It's the most involved process but everyone would get something and give something at the same time. Broken down you would go to the online cookbook site, submit your recipes to our project, we would place a group order and then I would send out everyone's books to them. It would require me to play middle man because they wouldnt ship out to everyone individually nor would they take everyone's individual money. So you would have to order through me, send my your money, and then I'd make the final group order and send everyone their books. I totally don't mind doing this I just would need to know that there are enough people committed to it to make it worth doing.

2) We could hold ebay auctions and donate the proceeds to the charity of our choice.

I love this goodsearch.com Free and easy. We could pick a charity to have our results go to.

3) We could also set up with recycle4kids and collect printer cartirdiges for the year and either donate to one of their approved charities or start a donation for COL and take the money to donate to a charity of our choice like a flock of chicks or any other charity we decide.

I would really love your feedback on this.

Would you like to participate?
Which of these would you be most likely to do?
Do you have another idea you'd like to share we could do?
What charity would you like to see our works go towards?

Truly this is my favorite part about our anniversary. It's an emotional high I can't get enough of.

Thanks,
Tera

I LOVE the flock of chicks idea! I'd like to do the cookbook, though I'd probably get involved in whatever one we decide on.

I love the Flock of Chicks thing too. Maybe with how many Chicks are here, we could even donate several flocks of chicks.

As to how I would like to participate, I would be willing to just donate $ for the cause. Easy, no extra work involved, no having to sell things or jump through hoops. I would be willing to, say, pass up on buying one new book and donating that money instead to the Chicks buy some Flocks of Chicks charity drive.

As to other charities, I just really like the idea of "Chick" associated things for this group, so that is why the flock of chicks things sounds so great. And Tera, I trust you, so I would be willing to mail you $ for something like this, and you could collect the $ and make one big donation to the cause or causes of choice, and let us know how much we ended up donating in the end. :o)

I like the Flocks of Chicks idea too, Tera. How do you envision we would accomplish this?

I was just looking more at the Heifer Project (the flock of chicks) site, and there you can also create a "team" where people on your team can donate directly to the charity, with a goal to raise X amount. You could always set up a CoL team, and people could donate directly to them.

http://www.heifer.org/site/pp.aspx?c=...

Some of the other charities on that Half the Sky page might have options for team fundraising too. Maybe CoL could come up with 2 or 3 preferred charaties (a literacy charity would be nice too) and people could donate as much or as little as they were able, but donate in the name of Chicks on Lit, so we can see how much we, as a group of wonderful book loving ladies, can change the world.

There was also one charity I noticed on the Half the Sky page, a Cambodian literacy charity, where if you raised and donated $13,000 they would build a rural school and name it after you.
http://www.cambodiaschools.com/
I'm sure that is way out of our fundraising league, but how cool would that be, to have a school built and named in honor of Chicks on Lit. :o)

Just throwing out ideas. I love the idea of a consolidated effort to make real changes for others in the world.

Sheila wrote: "I was just looking more at the Heifer Project (the flock of chicks) site, and there you can also create a "team" where people on your team can donate directly to the charity, with a goal to raise X..."

The team idea is excellent!

Great ideas Sheila! And you know as for being out of our fund raising league; just look at how many members there are now! If each member gave only $5 just look what the total would be!! Great things can happen if we all pull together.

Tera, the Flock of Chicks is PERFECT. I love that. I'm in for whatever you all decide and I trust you to send you my stuff for the recipe book. I'm in for that or for just donating money or whatever.....

I am with Holli. Point me in the right direction!

I love the team idea! I will set that up in the next 24 hours (knock on wood).
I read in the book about how a school was built after an organization that donated enough and was able to make contact with the wome and children that would benefit from it exchanging letters and even visiting. That would be incredible.
I wonder how it would translate to go on to the "Baby Chickens on Books School"? ;)

Tera wrote: "I wonder how it would translate to go on to the "Baby Chickens on Books School"?


With our luck, they would translate "Lit" to mean "on fire". The school would be "Baby Chickens on Fire!" and they'd think it was some morbid cooking school! :o)

Tera, I have been involved with the Heifer project with both my classes and my family. It is truly a great organization.

I love the idea of supporting educational projects for girls, or oter women empowerment charities. I have no experience with e-bay and probably would not give myself the time to learn. And, I have no recipees that are not already copyright protected, and I already recycle for charity. But, would be willing to donate to Heifer or a similar program with agood track record.

My mom turned me on to Project Heifer a few years ago and I love the flock of chicks idea.

I would love to participate in the cookbook. I chose my recipes last year!

Tera wrote: "Last year this didn't happen and it is one of my biggest regrets. I loved that we did this the first year and so wanted to do it last year but life got ahead of me and I didn't get this done. How..."

I would love to participate. Let's just pick a direction and run with it! If we could donate used printer cartridges and have them credited to our selected cause how easy would THAT be?!?!?

I love the Flock of Chicks idea! I'm in for whatever we decide on doing! Working together will be fun!

The more time I spend at the Heifer International site, the more excited I am about this project!

We donated to Heifer Int'l last year (09) for the owners of our corp as Christmas presents in their honor. We got water buffalo's. It was a real hit.... Like what do you give someone who has everything?
It is an honorable, exciting charity!

I'd participate in the cookbook option but anything else isn't doable. I regularly give/donate throughout the entire year so I haven't anything right now to auction.

http://www.heifer.org/c.swL1KcNZLxH/b...

Is the link (I hope) to our Team page for Heifer.org . You can go there and join the team and enter a donation amount. I just set it up and have to run out the door to pick up a kiddo from tutoring but I think I did it right. Let's see how many flocks of chicks we can contribute!

It let me join the team and donate! Go chicks!

I just donated! Thank you so much for setting this up, Tera.

We're going great guns over there! Thanks, Tera, for giving me (us) this opportunity!

This is fantastic, thank you!!!

When's our deadline to donate?

Wow, I love that we have already met 70% of the initial goal that Tera set. I think she might need to raise the goal! :o)

I also just noticed that the little picture of the chicks on the heifer page is changing color as the goal is met. How cute.

I could see a project like this being a year round thing here on CoL. It seems that Team Heifer page can be up as long as you want. Maybe people can continue donating all year long. Maybe over time (over several years) if we kept this "team heifer" going, we could actually donate a substantial chunk of $. Wouldn't that be great. And if people want to sell things on ebay or other things to raise money, then they can donate anytime when the have raised the funds.

It looks like when you sign up to join the team, you can also have your friends and family make donations for you in your name (similar to donation pages I've seen for things like breast cancer walks). If someone wanted to ask their friends or family to donate for them, maybe they could do a read-athon, and ask people to donate a dollar for every book they read for a month or something. I could see lots of ways Chicks could use this "team heifer" to raise money for this great charity.

Just throwing out thoughts again. :o) I'm just very proud of all the chicks considering participating in this, and would love to see a great consolidated effort like this show a significant gift made to a worthy charity, under the name of "Chicks on Lit", this group we all so love. :o)

I just made my donation... I love this! I would do this once a month if it's something we wanted to do year round... what a great idea!!

I just made my donation, we surpassed our goal already!

Suggestion: How about posting this on Facebook, I am sure we would get to a lot more people.

I just made a donation. Thanks for setting this up.

Meg wrote: "I just made my donation, we surpassed our goal already!

Suggestion: How about posting this on Facebook, I am sure we would get to a lot more people."

I did post it my facebook page - don't know whether people will respond, but it took about 5 seconds.

There was no end date when I set up the page so I suppose it goes on as long as we want (which is good because pay day is next week for me).
Great idea about facebook meg. When I set up the page I truly didn't have a goal I just wanted a place where we could all donate but I had to plug some numbers in and just went with 100.00. I did up the goal today since it was already met.
You guys rock!

This is great! I'll be sure to go over and sign up (and donate as soon as I do some online banking to make sure all's in order first, lol).

Thanks Tera!

I will be donating at the end of the week! It's amazing the amount of donations already!

Love it - our chicks are yellow from the feet to the belly! Let's get some little yellow heads!

Just donated! Go Chicks on Lit! We ROCK!!

FYI just to make it a little easier for people to find the site. This is the link that takes you to our Chicks on Lit team donation the Tera set up:

http://www.heifer.org/c.swL1KcNZLxH/b...

If that worked it will me a minor miracle.

Holli wrote: "I just made my donation... I love this! I would do this once a month if it's something we wanted to do year round... what a great idea!!"

It's almost February, so I'm bumping this in case someone didn't get to this in January.

Over $200! That's great, ladies!

I was able to give last week (after payday) :)
Thanks for the opportunity.

I jsut finished donating. Awesome to be apart of this! Yaaay!

Oh my gosh! I love that this happened! Any chance it'll happen again? I'd love to be involved!

Thanks for reviving this thread, Daniale. Yes, we did this almost 4 years ago. If a bunch of ladies were interested, we could always do it again, find a way to come together for a good cause. Is anyone else interested in something like this?

I still get e-mails from heifer international. :)

I would have liked to donate to something last year, but my finances were put through the wringer, so I wasn't able to. However, someone just told me about givegab.com, which is kind of social networking for volunteers. I'm going to do a bird count next month that I found on that site!