Good Peeps

Remember how I told you that Mique and Jess, the sister team that puts on the amazing, fabulous Queen Bee Market asked if I wanted to partner with them on a service element?

I had some fun ideas for a clever tie in with the handmade community (art supplies to a local homeless shelter?) but for the sake of simplicity, and since it was my inaugural run, I decided to host a canned food drive benefitting the Food Bank of San Diego.

I’d been to a QBM before, and while I didn’t have the chutzpah to put together an elaborate booth like the vendors do, I knew I couldn’t just have a folding table with white tablecloth thrown over the top either.

This is major pressure people!

You should SEE some of the booths!  Works of art.  Seriously.  And that’s not even counting the wares they are selling!

It’s not fancy, but I thought it was fun.

Rainbow bunting pretty much makes anything fun.

A last minute spraypaint job on a couple of glassless frames and twine helped display little notes and instructions about the drive.

Statistics from the Food Bank website, and a roll o’ tickets.

While I had people’s attention, I figured I’d shamelessly promote my ebook and blog while I was at it.

In Anthro latte bowls.

Because that makes it less shameless self-promotionesque, right?

I used the twine for my frames, and then figured I’d just leave them out for decoration.

I was going for happy rainbow colors anyway so I think it worked okay.

Vendors from the Market donated items that I put into prize packs to be raffled.

Those little buckets may not look very big, but each had over $200 worth of gear packed into them!

Because I knew that there would be people who came to the Market that didn’t have any idea about the canned food drive ahead of time, I wanted to give them an option to donate/enter the raffle too.  So I also collected dollars to be donated to the Food Bank as an option.

And then I started panicking.

I mean, who remembers to bring cans to a handmade market???

Seriously.

Not to mention that I who was organizing the food drive forgot my own cans!!!!

Um, yeah.

So, I was pretty convinced I’d have two lonely cans of creamed corn rolling around in the bottom of these giant barrels at the end of the day.

I second guessed myself.  Started sweating a little.  Feeling embarrassed at the thought of a fundraising bust.

And people came.

In fact, there was even a line at a couple of points with people bringing cans and waiting to fill out raffle tickets!!!

And by 9:45 a.m. one of the barrels was completely full!!!

(How cool is that sign?  Thank you to Mique for making that for me!)

By the end of the day, we had two full barrels of canned food and $80 to donate.

I ran the raffle tickets on the honor system.  I didn’t stand there all day monitoring people…so, assuming people were honest (which I’m pretty sure they were!), we brought in over 350 cans/dollars in one day!!!

So exciting!

I, once again, was reminded at the goodness in people.

Thank you to everyone who came and donated.

To all the vendors who participated in the raffle giveaway.

To Miq and Jess for all their hardwork putting together yet another ridiculously rad market.

Y’all are good people.

For reals.

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jeannett

I'm a mom to four. A wife to one. I believe in story. I love telling you about mine and would love to hear yours. There's really no sense in wasting our suffering and not sharing in each other's joy. We're all in this together...even if it doesn't always feel like it.

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