Sustainability In FRC Teams

[Bethie42]

Originally Posted by Brandon_L

We had the NASA grant for 3 years and have never raised that much..

I feel your pain....our team has been having a really tough year financially, despite efforts that started in the summer. Like someone said earlier, it is kinda tough to hear a team that's struggling with ~30K when our team habitually coasts on $5,000 plus maybe $600 for supplies, and we're having issues with that this year.

Part of the problem is that our school, besides small, is private and so the school can barely provide anything towards our team [people tend to think private-schooled kids are rolling in money, but they really aren't].

And oh gosh the NASA grant. We all had a very tough day today, we learned that we forgot to have our principal send the email to NASA certifying that we LOST our sponsor....just one SENTENCE added to the email certifying need for funding, was all that was needed, but we forgot it. We probably lost our chance at the grant because of that. We're beating ourselves up over that right now.

This is my senior year, I've absolutely loved FIRST and I really want to see our team have the chance to participate; there's a lot of new kids who are really excited, but don't have any clue what awesomeness they're in for. I do NOT want them to be unable to do FIRST because of a $1600 shortfall in funding. But it's getting really tense right now.

One problem we're facing this year is that most of our team graduated. It's hard to get corporate sponsorship when most of the team barely knows what FIRST's about. I [not to blow my own horn] have done an awful lot, but it still isn't enough and one person can't do everything.


This was going to be a great year: we have a 60% girls team, lots of students in all grades, a mentoring program worked out with the FLL teams we started at our school, several new mentors....lots of really awesome and enthused kids on the team. I really can't express how much I want them to be able to succeed! We've got a lot of exchange students too, think how cool for them to be able to take these memories back home. But now it's looking like we may not be able to afford FIRST.



Just tonight on CD I saw a post from an FRC team that can now only afford to do FTC. I'm really sad for that, and for all the other struggling teams out there right now.