Fundraisers…how I loathe them

Last week I was accosted by some members of the Golden High ninth grade football team who were selling raffle tickets for a team fundraiser. As someone who has mixed emotions about football (modern gladiators, injury potential, blah, blah, blah) I did not buy any tickets.

I utterly detest typical kids fundraisers – that is the raffle ticket/bumper sticker/magazine/scented candle/wrapping paper/candy bar variety. You expend a ton of effort to sell junk that no one wants at highly inflated prices, and in most instances the margins are small, usually because you’re making some fundraising company very wealthy. I can well remember high pressure presentations trying to turn my classmates and me into junior snake oil salesmen so that we could “earn” crummy prizes.

Mercifully, mom and dad were pretty cool about it. They hated buying the junk that other kids were selling, so instead of making me and Melissa take part, they usually just quietly made a small donation to the PTA or little league or debate club or whatever. Sometimes there were side benefits – like the time we got to eat a case of chocolate bars instead of selling them.

I also remember a couple of exceptions to our fundraiser boycott. For a while, Melissa was a world class Girl Scout cookie salesperson, and dad even helped out the cause by taking a sign-up form to work – a rare piercing of the work/home veil.

And then there was the time in elementary school when I was hell-bent on raising $25 for the children’s hospital – not because of any great virtue on my part, but because I coveted the T-shirt that came with such a generous effort. That was back when a walk-a-thon was a walk-a-thon. You asked people to sign up to support you on the basis of how many miles you would walk on a fifteen mile course. There were actually stations where a volunteer would check off that you had passed certain mile markers. To make my goal – and get my T-shirt – I had to walk the whole course, but because I was all of about 10 years-old at the time, mom had to walk the whole course with me. She dragged my sorry, chubby little self the last 5 miles, maybe even further. She even tried to buy me a popsicle with our emergency quarters – although, if I recall, they were sold out of anything you could buy for 50 cents. All in the name of making sure that I finished what I started and didn’t let those people down who I’d told that I would walk 15 miles.

God bless Katie Hale.