Hello everyone, we are team 2198 Paradigm Shift based out of Scarborough, Ontario Canada. Despite being a small school we strive to provide every student with a cost free opportunity to explore STEAM and business through our First robotics team. However due to unforeseen budget cuts we find ourselves $6000 CAD short of being able to register for the competition this year.
With only roughly 12 days left until the deadline to register, we turn to you, the First community to help us in this time of need. If you can connect us with any sponsors please feel free to reach out to our lead mentor Brian Wong at [email protected].
Thank you to everyone that has taken the time to read this post. Team 2198 would like to emphasize that any help provided is greatly appreciated.
I wish your team luck in raising the needed funds. If you haven’t already, your Team should email your RD/PDP to see what they have available to teams experiencing financial hardship, as resources for situations like these do exist.
We have run into this as well…limited sponsorships and all. And being a veteran team…funds just dry up as far as grants are concerned. We have reached out to our community…and they have been VERY responsive. a 100 here…a hundred there. Different organizations have helped us in the past and even now.
We wish you luck. And we hope to see you compete this year!
Fundraising is a big part of team operation and its plays a big part of how we define sustainability. I recommend you focus on grants and find a website where you can search them and apply like crazy (focus on the big opportunities, and develop smaller ones). Find local sustaining companies and develop relationships with them (demos, suggest events with them and their employees, integrate their expertise into your team). Our team is very fortunate to have a supporting school district, sponsors who have been with us for years and lots of businesses big and small. I recommend all teams fund their team and put money away to build a buffer for years where funds are difficult and fund raise year round.
We just started doing “Eat out to help out” type events with Panda Express, Red Robin, Chipotle and other restaurants. Some offer local nights or some will allow online nationwide orders. Students did a lot of googling online to find anything. They didn’t go to any restaurant in person so it has been really easy. Being that you’re in CA I’m sure the restaurants are different a little bit. Either way talk to some local restaurants about doing fundraiser nights where your team gets a part of the proceeds.
One year we needed money to go to Worlds and held a spaghetti dinner with a local club (elks, rotary, eagles, motor cycle club, whatever). People buy a meal ticket at the door and get a nice dinner made by the students and team parents. It brought in just under $3,000 USD that year. Those types of clubs do benefit dinners all the time. Your team foots the cost of supplies and food but you get the end profits. They also like to do 50/50 or other types of raffles to raise extra funds. Maybe ask team parents and students to donate items for raffle baskets and auction them off.
Outside of that a team parent also did “Super bowl squares” where people over 18 could buy a square (it’s a football gambling thing) for a quarter for X amount. 50% went to the owner of the correct square and 50% went to the team. I bought a couple extra squares that were donated all of it to the team. I don’t know where this lands on the legal radar and why it was a private thing handled by a team parent who worked at a credit union to manage the money and then make a private donation to the team with the final total. The official lead mentors and school employees were not involved in the process in any way shape or form except as able to participate like everyone else. We got an okay from our school as long as we weren’t directly invovled. The parents circulated it around social media and we got 2 sheets filled out bringing in $2,000 or so as well.
Granted super bowl is US and in February, maybe there’s other sporting events that you could something similar?
How many students are on your team? I’m thinking of one fundraising thing my team did this year, which was called a “donation drive”.
There’s almost no effort involved, each student on the team just messages ten family members or friends individually to ask them each to donate 20$. Let’s say there were 30 students on your team, and everyone that is asked donates:
20 x 10 = 200
200 x 30 = 6,000
Now we did it by sending letters, but because of the short time frame contacting people by email could work for you guys.
@AKD has your lead mentor reached out to William Neal at FIRST Canada about your team’s situation yet?
William and others at FIRST Canada want to see as many teams as possible grow and succeed here in Ontario. They’ve been very helpful in past years when I’ve been on a team facing tough financial hardship.
While I can’t promise anything will come of it (I’m not a rep for them), FIRST Canada may be able to help connect your team with local companies, grants or possibly work with you on the registration deadline.
UPDATE: We were successfully able to gather enough money to register for the competition. Thank you to everyone that helped us in the process. However we are still in need of funds for other things. Please do reach out to our mentor if you are able to connect us to any more sponsors. Once again Team 2198 would like to thank everyone that helped.
Continue to raise money! FRC ain’t cheap! Especially if you plan to go to Worlds!
Continue to reach out to the community to help out…it doesn’t have to be money…it can be a parts list. We did a “dream wall”. It started to work the first night we showed it to the community!