Mar. 20: The Hoe-Downs

My American Cancer Society (ACS) Relay for Life team is getting bigger and we’re already at 70 percent of our fundraising goal! How rockin’ awesome is that?

We need more peoples, though! Please join us! We’ve got 24 hours of relay time to fill with walkers, so as far as I’m concerned, there’s no limit to the number of people on our team. FYI, we’re planning a (kinda) hush-hush, (definitely) all-day-long Happy Hour at The Hoe-Downs’ Homestead at the relay. I know you wanna join us so you, too, can stumble drunkenly around the track for an hour or six. They’ll never forget us! They also may ask us not to return.

The members of The Hoe-Downs as of 11:00 this morning:

• Sunshine
• Val
• Dana
• Fancy Lori™
• Mother Mary
• Tina
• Jack
• Katie
• Victor
• Kim F’n-W

Go ahead; click on my team members’ names. You can see if they’ve fancied up their individual pages and you can donate to them too. If you prefer to donate to the team in general rather than a specific person, do that here.

As team captain, my fundraising dream is to go so far over our $1,000 goal that people say “Wow, those Hoe-Downs just couldn’t stop, could they?” to which we will answer, “No. No, we couldn’t.” So far we Hoe-Downs have been getting the word out by emailing family/friends and posting on Facebook, but there are so many other things we (and you) can do to raise funds for ACS! Some of the suggestions offered by other Relay for Lifers across the country:

• Ask coworkers for donations to ACS in exchange for a scheduled casual dress day at work.
• Here are some other at-work fundraising ideas.
• Lots of employers match donations to ACS. Find out if yours will match your gift at the Double Your Dollars page.
• You’ve seen the pink flamingos fundraiser thing, right? Here’s something that works the same way, but you put a purple toilet in someone’s yard (to “flush away cancer”). Put the toilet in the front yard of someone like my dad, and they’ll probably give you million$ to get it out of there ASAP. He would have HATED that.
• Home show parties are great ways to raise money. Ideas: candles from Partylite, jewelry from Lia Sophia, way-cool rubber stamps at Stampin’ Up, cooking products at Pampered Chef, storage items from Tupperware, gorgeous jewlery at Silpada, smell-goods from Scentsy, kitchen goods from Demarle at Home, jewelry from Cookie Lee, home décor projects from At Home America, organization gear from Clever Container, personalized items from Initials, Inc. (OMG, how cute is that stuff???), pet supplies from Shure Pets, and food goodies from Tastefully Simple. Talk to the consultant beforehand to arrange for a donation of a percentage of the total party; most will do 20-50 percent. If you don’t want to host a party in your home, consider a catalog party of the same items that you can show your coworkers, family, and friends.
• Sell items on eBay or etsy and donate profits to your team.
• It goes on and on. Here are tons of other possibilities.

A fundraiser in which you can participate locally: Applebee’s Pancake Breakfast, June 25. Tickets are $7, and Applebee’s will donate $5 of each ticket to American Cancer Society (your team gets the credit). Breakfast is at the Happy Valley Applebee’s from 7-10 a.m.

Thank you, again, to my team members and donors for all your help! Whether you can join our team to walk, or you just want to help us raise funds, or you donate to an individual, I appreciate every bit. You’re fab.

Remember: Relay for Life, North Clackamas—Saturday, July 16 10 a.m. through Sunday, July 17 10 a.m. at Clackamas High School. Will I mention this again in the next 118 days? Uh, prob’ly.