[fox46]

Aw darn, I was hoping you were somewhere in Ontario lol. I would start looking at the team rosters for regionals that are close to you and then try contacting local teams for some guidance. They likely have experience dealing with the school boards in your area and probably have a few leads on where to start fundraising.

When my friends and I started the team at our highschool years ago, we were at first a joint team with another local school in the now defunct "Canada First"- an early and failed attempt to bring FIRST to Canada. This introduced us to the idea of the robotics competition and when Canada First went belly-up and our partner school went their own seperate way we decided to enter FIRST during their inaugural year in Canada. Encouraged by Mark Breadner formerly from team 188 Blizzard, who worked for the Toronto District School Board at the time, we basically started by getting a couple teachers on board on a "If we do this will you open the shop for us?" basis. Then we cleared our intentions with the school administration. In retrospect I don't know that either the teachers or admin thought we would ever get the project off the ground. Mark helped us get the school board to sponsor our entry fee and after scraping together enough cash to build the robot, the rest is history. That first year our team was 100% student driven. We literally just went out and *did it*. In the years after, the faculty got more and more involved and by the time I left the team it was very much intergrated into school life. We gained more sponsors and even managed to get some mentors to give us a hand. Unfortunately due to the way the team was started we never had a strong mentor base. Since we had accomplished so much ourselves we never thought we needed them. The team was and I believe to this day, still is primarily run by students with alumni returning to mentor. I don't know that this is the best way to start and run a team but that's how we did it 11 years ago and 854 is still a very strong team today.