Reflection Up to Donation

Donating to help the animals in our community that are in need of help was a topic we came to pretty quickly. We wanted to do something more than just go through and donate what we could from our own houses so we organized drives and, in order to reach out to and help a multitude of animals, we contacted approximately eight shelters about their needs. This was a challenge for us because we realized that we had to get enough to donate to all shelters. Our goal was to help animals in need and benefit our community by taking things that may otherwise would have been waste. To do this, we stayed in contact with multiple people, organized drives for our former schools, and reached out to our community with announcements. Although we have not started organizing all the proceeds, by looking at what we did receive, we are afraid we won’t have very much for each shelter. Unfortunately two of our former schools were unable to host drives for us so that obviously set us back. From Crossroads, the school that did run a drive, we got three large bags of material which now makes up the bulk of our donations. We will be able to finish up in just a few weeks as we get all the toys made and organize what material is going where. Finally we will drop off all our proceeds at the shelters. We are especially looking forward to that final step of the project. Throughout these past few months, we have learned that time management is super important. After we had finished talking to all the shelters and reaching out to possible contributors, we feel that we got a little off task. There was more work that could be done outside of the classroom than there was to do confined to the use of our computers. The proceeds are stacked high and we have not started sorting them. After-school hours spent on this project are definitely going to have to come to pass if we are going to get all our proceeds out before school ends. On top of time management, we also learned to compensate for people who could not follow through. We got quite good at coming up with different ways to contact people and people to contact. If we did this project again, we would probably give more guidance to the schools and organizations we asked to run drives for us. Maybe if they had an outline for how to run the drive, more of them would have participated. The next step in our project is to make the toys and deliver them. We plan to make our first delivery this Saturday and are extremely excited for it!

Prep Stage

These past two weeks have shown a bit of stunted growth. We have been waiting for those who are running drives to get them underway so it's going to be awhile before collection. I am happy to announce that we now have our box set up in the office though!

It is a setback that the drives have not been set up yet. We do not have any way to prepare for the amount of supplies we get. One concern we have would not be receiving enough to go to all the shelters. If this is the case, we will have to choose which shelters need the supplies more. This shouldn't be too big of a deal though if we keep open lines of communication to the shelters. Some of them have mentioned that they may have more cats than dogs at the moment which would cancel the need for dog toys.

After we collect our supplies, our next step would be to reassess the needs of the shelters we have contacted and start preparing for that. We predict that it will take several days to get all the cloth ready as we will have to wash and sort all of it and depending on whether it is to be used as toys, cut and braid it.

One thing that we have learned is that reaching people who are going to donate is not the easiest prosess. Even though we have been on the announcements for a few weeks, the box, which has been in the office for a week and a half is still empty. Although we received our first donation from my aunt, we are going to need a lot more. To further reach out to the students of Saratoga High, we have been asking teachers if we can speak to their classes for just a few minutes to tell them about the project.

Setting the Stage for Phase 3

Since last we updated, a lot has happened with Cloth for a Cause. My old elementary school, Crossroads Christian School, has begun a school-wide drive to donate to us. Amanda's old middle school, Redwood, was also very willing to help out and started their own drive as well. Amanda and I have also successfully gotten the word out at our current highschool by speaking with Mrs. Dini. Even with this progress, we are still waiting to hear back from several people that we reached out to in hopes of finding some more help. We've learned that patience is a virtue as we wait for those who could help us out to respond. On top of that, we have learned that communication skills are key in getting a process started. Staying in touch and updated with everybody may prove to be a slight challenge but we will try our best.

One setback we had was a few people who we had reached out to turned us down. The Sobrato FFA club was a loss due to the experience they have running drives and the amount of supplies they could have received for us. To make up for this, we are contacting more people and reaching out to a few additional local businesses.

The next step is fairly simple. While still waiting on replies, we will start our collection process, aka Phase 3. This will probably begin happening in the next few weeks as those we reached out to start to receive donations.

Facebook Page

Please go check out our Facebook page for more details and information about our project! Much appreciated! :)

Cloth for a Cause

Phase Two of Cloth for a Cause

In our 2nd week of Cloth for a Cause, we are attempting to start phase 2 where we contact people who will provide us with our needed materials.

One setback that we have had is getting behind in the schedule due to multiple projects and tests in other classes. This is a pretty big project that we have to manage and find time for, which we have no problem doing since we are helping out animals, but it's a lot harder to find time with other classes in the way. In order to get back on track, we will be more effective with the little time that we do have by contacting more people than we had originally intended. I am contacting her elementary and high school, both of which are very much into helping with charity projects. Amanda also contacting her middle and elementary schools. After a dialogue has been set up we will report on just how many clubs or schools are going to be involved in donating. When that happens, we can begin to estimate how much cloth we will be receiving. 

As we were waiting on those who we reached out to, we did some more research into animal care in California. We found some very disturbing facts. Thirty percent of dogs that go into shelters are euthanized a year. On top of that, forty one percent of cats are put down due to the fact that our shelters just can't cope with the numbers. We really hope that our donations will improve animal care but can't help having heavy hearts. By the end of the project though, if Amanda and I don't end up with four or five more animals each, I will be surprised! 

The Beginnings of Cloth for a Cause

For our Anatomy and Physiology class, we were recently given an assignment that we, as students, create our own project. Sounds unique, right? The idea of twenty time, or genius hour, has actually been around for a while though. Google is accredited for the idea of the project as it gave employees 20% of the time spent at work to develop their own creative ideas. The same concept applies in the classroom. We were expected to find a topic that proved interesting and make up our own project to work on every Monday in class.

For our project, we have decided to help the animals of the Silicon Valley and beyond by showing our love for them. We hope to aid the shelters and animal hospitals by helping them care for more animals.

From our initial research, we found that shelters don’t have the materials or the funds to buy needed materials for the animals. We are going to collect blankets, old towels, and even socks to make toys and bedding needed to satisfy their need for these materials.

On a weekly basis, we will be contacting shelters and working with them to try and meet their needs as best as we can. As we have already been in contact with a few shelters, we have found that some want just the towels and blankets for bedding to make the animals more comfortable and others would like us to cut and braid our collections to make dog toys for entertainment.

In the end, we would have helped animals locally as well as out of state. We want to make a positive difference in animal care. On top of creating a better environment in shelters, we will hopefully have also recycled quite a lot of old towels, blankets and clothing to make a positive impact on our community.

One challenge that we might face is the process of reaching out to people in our community  who would like to donate these materials. We will be making a Facebook page putting up flyers and boxes in different locations. We need to learn how to manage doing this as well as juggling different shelters needs as well as our school work.