Sustainability In FRC Teams

[Garret]

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]....

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.

My team has had similar experiences but somehow we have managed to make it through each year. According to what you describe you seem to have a really good program. It would be a real shame for a program like that to disappear for something like that. I hope you somehow manage to secure that funding.

For a few years my team all but disappeared when we lost school support. We moved into one of the team members garages for building and all of our 10+ Lego programs disappeared. At the same time the other team in our city failed after their NASA grant expired (we have since combined into one big team). To add to the hurt our main mentor ended up changing companies after my first season and our team was on its own. We did not know we would be able to participate until literally hours before the deadline to pay. Somehow we the money came through and we survived.

This year for us is a different story. We have reached out to our community (luckily we have a large industrial center) and they have supported us. Our funding has increased greatly despite losing more than half of our funding last-year when our sponsor was bought-out. We have worked non-stop over the summer and during the school year meeting weekly for fundraising. We have already gotten guarantees for ~12.5 thousand this year. We are lucky because we are the only team in our area and have a lot of businesses to reach out too. The reason this changed was that we got a new mentor who helped us set up the team like a business and taught us how to go about getting sponsors.

Hearing about teams going under due to funding is very saddening to me, because of how close my team came to that. I really hope that your team pulls through.