This committee is a lot of fun. The fundraising committee gets to work with the community to raise funds for not only the kiddos and their siblings, but also financially for the families as well. When kids are afflicted with cancer, it consumes the entire family. Everyone is afflicted with cancer in the family. It is a tremendous and taxing toll that is placed on the family – financially, spiritually, and emotionally. Everyone can benefit from the fundraising.
We need help with people going out to the community and raising funds from not only retailers, but also corporate sponsors and individuals.
Examples of Active Corporate and Community Supporters:
Firethorne Neighborhood
HEB
Cinco Charities
Burrow Global
Chuy’s Restaurants
Target
Academy
Chasewood Bank
The Commons Church
Keller Williams Premier
Katy ISD
Capital Benefits
Chick-fil-A
Best Buy
MasterWord
Starbucks
We need help deepening those relationships and also expanding our donors. Not only do these corporations donate financially, but they also have contests internally with their employees and get their employees actively involved in Stuff the Sleigh by hearing the cause and coming up with ways to get their families involved in fundraising. We also need help working with Firethorne and getting the individual neighbors involved by picking up a wish list, donating toys and money and dropping it off in our Stuff the Sleigh sleigh that we have at the Firethorne neighborhood community center.
Over the last few years, we have purposely held back excess funds and have kept them in the Stuff the Sleigh account for a specific purpose. In the past, all of our excess has gone to pay for financial scholarships at Texas Children’s Hospital to specifically pay for medical bills for families of cancer patients that could not afford it. Over the last few years, we have held back some of this money with the idea of creating a scholarship foundation for Katy/West Houston and/or Houston child survivors of cancer that are going to college. We would love to create a foundation with matching scholarship funds to create an endowment to help families who have had a child survive cancer to offset some of the cost of college through a scholarship. We need help building out that scholarship endowment.