“A cookie a day keeps the doctor away!”
– Rashmi Bopitiya
OSC’s Care for Paws service group was back at it again with their annual Christmas bake sale, aimed at raising funds for the annual sterilization and vaccination camp for 2019. Given that our aim as a service group is to raise awareness about the overpopulation issue with street animals, especially dogs, in Sri Lanka and to improve their lives by controlling and reducing the issue for the future, our sterilization and vaccination camp is an event that we strive towards organizing as it is the best way to help and support them while preventing it from happening again.
Our Christmas bake sale is an effective way of engaging all our school community towards this great cause and since we Care for Paws members bake the cookies ourselves, there are many things we learn from the experience with initiative and planning being the key learning outcome.
PC: Disara Samayawardhena
As the service leader, planning and organization was fundamental in ensuring the success of the whole fundraiser. Unlike our previous years, we decided to change our annual bake sale into a pre-order bake sale where a google form was sent out to all OSC parents, teachers and staff who ordered the cookies which were sold in bulk, not individually. This means that, all the cookies and Christmas goodies were sold in different plate sizes, hence different prices, and could be ordered on the google form with the specific quantities required a week prior to the collection dates which were either Wednesday the 12th or Thursday the 13th of December. The plate sizes we offered went as follows:
- The Elf Plate – this was a small plate, with 5 Christmas cookies only, sold at 350rps.
- The Reindog Plate – a medium sized plate with around 7 Christmas cookies shaped as different animals, sold at 500rps.
- The Grinch Plate – a medium sized plate with around 7 different Christmas goodies and our signature seven-layer bar, aka the diabetes bar, for all the naughty kids, sold at 800rps.
- The Santa Plate – the largest plate with 10 different Christmas goodies, sold at 1200rps
Below is a short tutorial as to how to order on the google form and how we received the responses.
To organize the orders and bake according to the received quantities required collaboration and planning with my co-service leader Disara Samayawardhena and it was essential for both of us to stay on track with these orders, assign tasks to different students as to what they bake and arranging meetups for all of us to bake together. Many hours were spent on baking and decorating, meeting up every weekend for two weeks to bake at our service teacher’s house and when the orders were complete, and the sales days came, we were thrilled and excited to hand out our goodies to our generous customers and were happy to earn over 50,000rps from this fundraiser.
Making the goodies! PC: Disara Samayawardhena
I am happy to say it was greatly successful and look forward to using this money to hold an even bigger sterilization and vaccination camp than last year!
Merry Christmas xx