Over the past several years, FIRST has been growing at and increasingly rapid rate. While this growth is great in advancing the mission of FIRST, it makes the fundraising process more and more difficult each year as more and more teams are fighting for the same limited resources. In iF’s newest program, tentatively titled “One dollar”, we seek to use FIRST’s continuing growth as a tool to help teams with money problems raise the necessary funds to participate.
Here’s the basic idea:
Each team asks each of their members, teachers, parents, etc. to donate $1 (or more if they can/want to). The team then assembles all the money into one check and sends it to iF. All teams that collect money will be recognized, while students who donate more will be given further recognition. We then use this money to support teams and put it towards iF projects.
As many people realize, we are working on project like the ‘Traveling Toolbox’ and the free/low cost web server for all teams to use. At this point, we will implement the 80-20 system, in which 80% of the money goes to teams in grants and 20% goes back to iF for further projects, etc. Any questions or comments about this, please reply to this post or email Leon Machado at
lmachadoiv@inspirationinc.org.
Checks can be made out to: The Inspiration Foundation Inc.
The checks can be mailed to:
1168 Pleasant St.
Bridgewater, MA 02324
Please feel free to pass the news around to as many other teams as possible. The more teams we get into this, the more money we can accumulate, which means we can give more to those teams who really need it.