In-School Publicity

If my experience in the TJSPI has taught me one thing, it’s that fundraising is the most arduous, frustrating, and time consuming process ever, and publicizing is a close second. We’ve been working so hard recently to get the funds we need that we sort of neglected publicity, and it’s come back to bite us; last month we began to realize that we were going to be able to install the panels in a matter of months but that majority of the kids at TJ had no idea it was happening. To remedy this, we started going to school events such as theater productions and class fundraisers to set up our faithful tri-fold of information and to try to get students and their parents to notice us. The results have been varied. Some people walk by us and try to not make eye-contact, but others are genuinely interested. One elderly couple spent five minutes telling me that I’m a hero and an upstanding youth for making this effort to save the environment, and one kid got me into a full-blown debate over the existence of global warming and the definition of the apocalypse. The donations I’ve collected have also been varied. One kid gave me two dollars he found in his pocket because he wanted to find out if we really mailed donors a thank you letter, and yet one mom got so excited that she sat down right then and there and wrote me out a $250 check. On the whole I was encouraged by the amount of support and enthusiasm that I found in the school community. The primary goal of the TJSPI is to implement solar panels at TJ, but secondarily we want to inform people about the environmental crisis going on and how there are very accessible solutions, and I think we’re slowly but surely getting there.

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Sarah