Our first hurdle was finding a place. The church where we met had a kitchen and would normally let us use the space for free, but they had a wedding booked for the day we had chosen. Our next choice was the American Legion Hall, which we also could have used for free, but they were having a fish boil. We then approached the City to see if we could use the Community Center. They usually charge $250 for rent, but when I explained why we were doing this, the clerk suggested I write a letter to the City and be put on their agenda, which we did. The girls and I attended the City Council meeting. The girls explained what we were doing and why we wanted to use the Community Center for free. The council talked about it for a few minutes and agreed unanimously to waive the fee. A side effect of this was that the reporter from the local paper who covers the City Council meeting decided to include it in his story.

We decided that we would aim for feeding from 200 to 250 people, and charge $5 per ticket, with children under 5 eating for free. A Boy Scout leader friend of mine told me they usually had around that many. We asked the local Meijer (a large store chain in the Midwest similar to Walmart, but friendlier) for a donation and they gave us a gift certificate for $25. We bought 1 pound of coffee, sugar, creamer, powdered lemonade, plastic table cloths (the kind that come on a roll and can be cut to fit), and hamburg. I don't remember how much hamburg. The rest of the food was donated by friends and family. One of the moms is in a sorority that does charitable work. One of the other members works for a dollar store, and was able to supply us with 24 2 pound boxes of spaghetti, and a case of sauce. Another sorority member works for Coles Baked Goods (frozen garlic bread). The company gives employees a case of bread each year, and she donated it to us. One of the dads donated the paper goods (plates, napkins, tableware, and cups). The families donated the supplies to make desserts.

We made about 40 apple pies and about 5 pans of brownies. Some of the pies we cut up for dessert, the rest we sold for $5.

We cooked the spaghetti ahead of time, which was a real time saver. We put it in Ziploc brand gallon freezer bags (we tried store brand bags, but they did not hold up well). I think we put too much spaghetti in some bags because some took a while to reheat, but if you fill them about half full it would work great. We kept them refridgerated and just dropped them into a big pot of boiling water. Any left over can be frozen and reheated later.

A friend of the troop who works in the culinary department at a local college came by to help us dress up the bottled sauce. She brought spices, and we added the ground hamburger. We left some of the sauce without meat. She also let us borrow three chafing dishes, which we used for serving.

We sent out a press release to the local paper. They put it in the weekly calendar and put in a small news item the day off the supper

Tickets: one of the girls designed the tickets using Publisher and printed them out on the blank business card paper. We presold about half the tickets, which really made a difference. Many of the people who bought tickets ahead of time didn't come, but if we hadn't presold them, we would not have made as much money!

We used large pots, spoons, serving bowls, trashbags, a cash box, a cardtable, dish towels, paper towels, chafing dishes, timers, coffee makers, cold drink contatiners, and hot mitts. (The community center had very few kitchen items).

We arrived at the community center 2 hours before our opening to start cooking and set up. In addition to selling tickets, we also had a donation jar (one that we used throughout all our fundraisers). We put table cloths on the tables (16), set up two tables for serving, got the sauce and spaghetti started, made coffee and lemonade. We cut up some of the pies, and the brownies, and put them on small plates at one end of the serving tables. We also displayed the pies we had for sale. Many people in town had had our pies before and we sold all but two or three, which we gave to the people who helped us. About 4 members of the local Boy Scout troop came and helped us set up, serve, and clean up. If we had been a larger troop we wouldn't have needed the extra help, but the troop consisted of only 4 girls.

We netted $1029. I think this is about it, but if you have any questions you can email me at [email protected]

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For the pancake breakfast we were able to hold it in the basement of the local church, which has a nice kitchen. We did not get as much food donated as we did for the spaghetti supper, although we did get a 10% discount on everything we bought at the local bulk food store (like Sam's Club only no membership fee.)

We bought pancake mix (1 box), sausages (1 large box), foam cups, orange drink, and cocoa mix (l large box). One of the parents donated maple syrup. We had coffee and related items left over from the spaghetti supper. I think we also had plates and table ware left over

Parents volunteered to cook the pancakes and sausages

The timing on the breakfast was not the best. The girls had just finished the Council Fall Sale, and our annual pie sale, so they were not able to sell many tickets in advance. Most of our ticket buyers were people who came the day of the event.

For publicity, the city put up the date and time on their local board, which is seen by many motorists going to and from work. We also sent out a press release to the local paper.

The day of the breakfast we arrived about 2 hours early to set up and start cooking. We opened at 8:00 am, I think, and we would not have lost any business if we had started at 9:00 am, which made us very nervous. But we had a good turnout after that.

We netted $485 on this event, which was pretty good considering we were all fund-raised out at the time. I think this is about it, but if you have any questions you can email me at [email protected]

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A local business let us use their water and parking lot to hold the car wash. The local hardware store donated car wash soap. Girls brought car washing items from home, such as buckets, sponges, old towels, squeegees, hoses, and spray attachments. We also brought a step ladder (so we could reach SUV tops) and a long piece of clothesline (to hang wet towels on). We brought coolers to keep food and drinks in for slow times, and chairs for the adults. Needless to say, hats, sunglasses, and sunscreen are also a must.

The girls made posters that we put up along the road sides. These need to have BIG, DARK LETTERS so passing motorists can read them easily

The first year, we charged $5 a car, the subsequent years we did a free will offering. We actually made more money with the free will offering.

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We sold cookies, cakes, brownies, pies, breads, no-bakes, fudge, and muffins. Our top seller at each bake sale was pies. We had a lot of people walk by saying that they were on diets. We sold the cookies and fudge in small amounts (1 to 6 pieces) as well as in dozens. This seemed to help.

We made signs saying who we were and why we were raising money. We brought tables and chairs with us, as well as sandwich bags so we could sell small items, paper plates for the cookies and brownies, scissors, markers, tags, and tape. We started with $50 in change (2 rolls of quarters, dimes, and nickels, and the rest in $1 bills.)

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This was our favorite fundraiser. Pies pretty much sell themselves, and doing them before the holiday season was a big help. We had regular customers who would buy 4 or 5 pies. The local church youth group sold pies at the same time, but neither group ever found that we were competing with each other. We also had a really fun time putting the pies together. We pre-sold the pies so we would know how many to make. We divided the total number of pies by the number of girls, and each girl would make that many pie crusts ahead of time. They paired up to make their pies and, apparently, had a blast doing it. We would meet at 9:00 am on the day of pie making, in the kitchen of the church where we met. We would have one person washing and peeling apples, two cutting them up and putting them in pie shells, two rolling out dough, and one person putting in the spices and wrapping them in tin foil. A few times, we had friends come and help us. One year, three boys from the National Honor Society helped us, which was fun. Not many boys know how to roll out crust! We were usually done by 3:00 pm.

To put the pies together, we used about 3 bags of flour to roll out, about 4 bags of sugar, 1 large (bulk size) container of nutmeg and 1 of cinnamin, and perhaps 1 large rolls of tin foil (200 sq feet) to make 92 pies. We also needed rolling pins, apple/peeler corers, wax paper (we rolled the crusts on the wax paper so we could roll up the flattened crust and put it aside until the girls needed it in the pie plates, knives, measuring cups, measuring spoons, cd player/radio (very important with teenagers), aprons, paper towels, camera (very important for troop memories), and boxes for each girl in order to transport the finished pies.

The pie crust recipe is in Word. The order forms for blueberry and apple are in Publisher, as are the blueberry and apple pie cooking instuctions. We printed these out, one for each pie sold, on shipping labels and stuck them on the pies after they were wrapped in tin foil.

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We all made different crafts to sell. Some of them we made during meeting time, some the girls did on their own. Cement garden nicknacks went well. The girls bought them unpainted, and painted them before selling them. We also had a variety of knitted items. We found that small, inexpensive things went fairly well, but didn't bring in much money. One thing we sold that was a surprise hit has balloon animals on sticks. One of the girls could do a dog, which we attached to a hot dog stick and sold for a quarter. They were *very* popular to the point that we ran out of balloons! We needed chairs, tables, cash box, change, canopy, cooler for drinks and bag lunches, sunscreen, books (to read while it was quiet), markers and posterboard, pricing dots, pens, and a calculator (with extra batteries).

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This was fairly easy to put together. Again, the troop families donated all the supplies.

We put an ad in the weekly flyer that goes home to elemenatary students. Our public relations document is in Word. I put my home phone number in for safety reasons. I wrote up a form to collect the information we needed when parents called. I gave the form to the girl who was going to bake the cupcakes next. I did find that I needed to keep all the info, and to whom I had given the form, because sometimes the girls lost the forms and we had no way of getting back in touch with the parents. We only had one parent *not* pay us, and the girl who did the baking lost the form so we couldn't call her and remind her. We did find that sometimes parents were so grateful that they didn't have to do any baking that they paid us more than the $5 we charged. Many of the parents mailed a check to me, some wanted the cupcakes delivered to them, and they would pay the girl. Some parents dropped by my house and left the money.

We tried to buy supplies when cake mixes and frosting went on sale. We bought a variety of sprinkles, jimmies, and holiday decorations that we shared among ourselves.

Most of the time, the girls would deliver the cupcakes to the elementary school classroom before they had to be at school. Our high school starts earlier than the elementary. If the classroom teacher was not in yet, the girls left the cupcakes in the elementary office.

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We did some other money earning activities as well:

Garage Sale: We asked parents, friends, and family to donate garage/yard sale type items. With four girls in the troop, we had quite a haul. We did it on a day when just about everyone else in my neighbor hood was also having a garage sale, so we didn't have to pay for the whole ad, and had lots of traffic. We made about $350. The girls didn't like pricing, so my husband and I did most of that, but the girls did come early to put things out, and they took care of everything else. We needed our cash box and change, tables and chairs, poster board and markers (so we could tell people that we were raising money for our trip). We took the leftovers to GoodWill. It took four cars to get it all there!

Badge Sewing: I ended up doing this one because none of the girls liked to sew, but the idea was a good one. We offered to sew try-its, badges, patches, and IPs on to other Girl Scout's sashes/vests. The few people we (before I got wise to the girls not wanting to do this) were very appreciative. I don't remember what we charged, but there was a break in the price for more than 3 badges.

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