Help Cleveland’s Children Read with Imagination Library: Final

Hello Friends!

As you might already know, our campaign for the Imagination Library is now over. We are excited to share that we reached our goal of $1,000 and actually surpassed it!

In total we raised $1,004. Thanks to your generosity, seventy-seven children will now have access to books. You have our thanks as well as the thanks of these children, their families, and their community.

Unbeknownst to many, Illiteracy is still a serious problem in America. The Imagination Library helps ends this cycle and makes sure that every child has the opportunity to learn to read. This program helps children prepare for school and puts children on a more level playing field.

Anyone child from birth to age five is eligible to sign up for the program, regardless of wealth. If you have a child you would like to enroll in the program to receive a book each month, you can visit the Imagination Library website for more information.

Again, thank you all for sharing our story and contributing to our campaign! Even though the campaign is over, but you can still give! If you’d like to help please reach out to the United Way of Bradley County. They would certainly appreciate it.

 

Help Cleveland’s Children Read with Imagination Library: 3 DAYS

Hello again friends!

We are so close to hitting our goal thanks to all of your generosity! With only three days left we need your help now though more than ever!

We were very happy to be featured on both the Imagination Library of Bradley County Facebook page and the Governor’s Books from Birth Foundation‘s page. I hope you all got to see it! If you missed it click on the links and check it out.

We also made the newspaper last week! Check out the Cleveland Daily Banner to read our story and see what other students in our class have to say about the project. We are grateful for all of this publicity! As you all might remember, getting the word out about what we were doing was the biggest problem we faced at the beginning of our campaign.

We are $329 dollars away from helping the children of Cleveland, who might not otherwise have access, receive book each month. If we don’t hit our goal Indiegogo will take a larger portion of our funds that we raised, close to fifty dollars more! That is enough to send four children books for a month!

Help the young children of this small town prepare for school by donating and sharing our story while there’s still time. Thank you all again for your support this far! Now let’s do this!

Help Cleveland’s Children Read with Imagination Library HALFWAY

Hello friends!

Today is a great day! Together we have almost raised $500 for the Imagination Library in Cleveland. That’s almost FORTY children we’ve provided books for! Forty families are smiling right now because of you! Give yourself a pat on the back!

We are appreciative of all of your help this far and with nineteen days left in the campaign we are confident that we can reach our goal of $1,000 and help almost eighty young children. Please continue to share what we are doing and consider joining the cause and promote literacy.

If you haven’t already please take a look at our Indiegogo page and like us on Facebook for updates on our progress.

In the following days we are going to focus our efforts on getting word out about our campaign, including writing PR releases and reaching out to local news and newspapers. If you have any advice let us know!

 

 

The Garden Group: Update

Hello friends! The Garden Group here! Maggie speaking!

I hope you are all having a wonderful Easter holiday, we certainly are! In case you missed it, our campaign is live and in full swing. As of today, The Garden Group has raised $330 for the city of Cleveland, Tennessee. We could not be more grateful for the support and generosity we have received thus far!

As we continue this campaign, The Garden Group is preparing to notify local newspapers, both in Cleveland and in Knoxville, contact the Bradley County school system, and notify local businesses within Cleveland to help build awareness and hopefully gain donations for this project. We are hoping to raise our full amount of $2000 so that Impact Cleveland is able to build the garden this community deserves.

If you haven’t yet, you can donate to our campaign here! If you are unable to donate, please like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter so that you can help spread the word.

Help Cleveland’s Children Read with Imagination Library

Hello Friends!

In case you missed our last update our campaign for the Imagination Library in Cleveland, Tennessee is now live!!

We are so excited to help our new little friends in Bradley County! To see children this excited about books and reading is a great sign for the future. We want to ensure that they will be able to continue to receive books and, for that, we need your help!

If you haven’t already, please take a look at our Indiegogo page!

We are so thankful to each and everyone of you for your support thus far. Please consider sharing our campaign for the Imagination Library with your friends and making a donation!

Thanks to your generosity so far we are already able to provide books to seven children for the next year! That’s incredible! Let’s help even more together! We are only $9 away from having raised $100!

Ready to Launch!

Hello all! We have now returned from a much-needed Spring Break and are ready to continue with our campaign. We are excited to continue raising money for No Child Hungry and the good work they are planning to do in the community. Rest assured, although you haven’t seen a post from us in a while, we have been hard at work to ensure this project runs smoothly and is as successful as possible.

The long awaited moment is just around the corner! We have almost completed all of the work necessary for a successful Indiegogo site and plan to make the site LIVE this Thursday! The video is now finished and it looks phenomenal. We really believe that the interviews we held while in Cleveland are going to hit the hearts of our audience in such a beneficial way.

If you want to get connected with the campaign before the site is launched, check us out on social media! We now have Facebook and Twitter pages up and running and would love your support. Our Facebook page can be found by searching “Cleveland, Tennessee: No Child Hungry” and our Twitter account is @SummerFeeding. Like, follow, and get excited for the changes that are to come!

Playground Renovation Campaign: Update

Hello all!  Hope everyone has had a great start to their week!

We are excited to announce that our group made our way over to Cleveland, Tennessee this past weekend!  While there we visited the playground and the community surrounding it, gathering multiple pictures and videos of the area.  Once we arrived in Cleveland our group got a firsthand view of the condition of the playground and community, and now understand why the community leaders have put this project at the top of their list.  Unfortunately the Impact Cleveland leaders were unavailable to meet with our team at the time of our trip, but we are continuing our communication with them via e-mail as needed!

Over the next week and a half, our group will be working day and night to get the content for our campaign together so that we can have our Indiegogo and social media sites up and running. We are also tirelessly working on a business letter that we hope to send out soon to businesses around the Cleveland area in hopes they will join our team toward creating a better playground for the children of Cleveland. Our team has created a team contract and our currently editing and revising it to make sure we are holding ourselves to the highest degree.  Another exciting announcement we are excited to share is the creation of a team name.  From here on out you can call us The Recess Renovators!

We hope everyone has an amazing week! See you next time!

P.S. Here is a sneak peek of some of the pictures we gathered while visiting the Impact Cleveland playground.

Community Garden Campaign: Update

The Garden Group here! Maggie speaking!

Hello friends! We hope you’ve had a great start to your week. We certainly have!

Today is a very big day for our group…we’re going to Cleveland! This afternoon we will be departing for Cleveland, Tennessee to meet the lovely individuals assisting us with our community garden campaign, familiarize ourselves with the city, and shoot video and take pictures of the soon-to-be community garden site. We hope you are just as excited as we are!

After visiting Cleveland, we will be working for the rest of this week and the next to edit and finish our video so that we can have it up and running in time for the launch of our campaign. Our fabulous group member, Scott, will be putting his video editing skills to the test as he will work tirelessly to completely it in a timely fashion. One more shout out to our own Scott Serro, he has designed our group a logo to use for our social media accounts and on our Indiegogo site. If you are interested in checking that out, be sure to follow us on Twitter at @UTKGardenGroup and like us on Facebook at Community Garden Campaign for Cleveland, Tennessee. We will be posting updates more in the weeks ahead.

For the rest of this week, our group will be working to complete a business letter, which will be given to local businesses both in Knoxville and in Cleveland to inform them about the intricate details of our campaign in hopes that they will potentially join us in our quest to give Cleveland a community garden.

Best,

Help Cleveland’s Children Read with Imagination Library: UPDATE II

Hello again friends!

We have made significant progress in the last couple of days! Our group has been a little overwhelmed and intimidated by this project, but after a slow start, we are finally ready to tackle it!

Our plans are solid and our hopes are big! After a long meeting the other night, we are all on the same page and motivated to get going! While we are still a few steps away from starting the campaign, we have gotten a lot of the preliminary work done.

Madison has completed our letter to businesses asking for perks and reached out to the people at Cleveland’s United Way to get more information on the Imagination Library program. We want to ensure that we are fully informed and planning properly. What kind of perks would you like to see us offer?

Chrisse is hard at work on our Indiegogo page and hopes to have it complete soon. She is also gathering pictures of friends’ younger siblings with books to use in our campaign.

Will has been planning out our video that we will include on our page to give you all a visual aid and explain what the campaign is all about. We are excited to begin filming Monday afternoon and look forward to you all being able to see the finished product! Is there anything you would like to see in the video? Let us know and we’d love to include it!

Everything is beginning to come together and just in time! We’ll go live in just a few weeks!

Community Garden Campaign: Update

The Garden Group here! Maggie speaking!

I hope you all are having a lovely week so far. Since our group last blogged, we have been busy planning and strategizing for our Indiegogo campaign. Scott, Shante, Ariana, and myself wrote an in-depth memo for our professor last week. We want you to feel in the loop as well, so today I will be sharing brief segments of it with you. Our memo gave a detailed description of every aspect of our community garden campaign as we know it today, for example: what the garden will be requiring, such as: shovels rakes, garden hoses, etc, the amount of money we hope to raise to fund the purchasing of these tools, a rough outline of the dates we hope to accomplish specific tasks, and detailed descriptions of the ways we will be getting information about our campaign out to the public.

Here are some details we included in the memo.

As you now know, we are working through Indiegogo to crowdfund a community garden for the city of Cleveland, Tennessee. We are hoping to raise at least one thousand dollars to cover the cost of establishing the garden and providing lawn and garden equipment. One thousand dollars is what we currently feel will provide the necessary tools; however, that number may be adjusted in the future depending on whether or not the garden’s requirements are altered. For this campaign, we are partnering with the organization Impact Cleveland. They will be assisting us with fact checking and act as a go-between for the city of Cleveland and ourselves. In the near future, our group will be visiting the city to gain knowledge of the area, meet with locals, and shoot a video describing our project in the location where the garden will be placed. Besides blogging, in the upcoming week our group will be establishing a Twitter and Facebook account to keep you up to date on our campaign’s happenings. Be on the look out for us on social media!

The Garden Group’s Campaign Timeline

(I urge you to keep in mind that certain dates are subject to change. We will post a concrete timeline as soon as it is established.)

Today March 3, 2015: We have posted a blog update describing the memo written last week.

March 9, 2015: We will launch our social media sites.

March 10, 2015: We will be revising our memo to include more details. After it has been revised, we will be creating a blog post to give you a concrete timeline and provide a link to the memo itself.    

Before Spring Break: We are hoping to visit the city before Spring Break to shoot video and take pictures that will be featured on our Indiegogo site. This is one of those dates that is not yet set in stone; however, we will let you know as soon as we have a date set.

April 9, 2015: The Community Garden Campaign for Cleveland, Tennessee is launched on Indiegogo!

Every week we will be blogging to keep you updated on our progress as we develop the campaign. Once our campaign is officially up and running, we will blog to let you know how the campaign is developing and where we are with fundraising. Once they are established, be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter to receive brief daily updates!