Event Insurance

Hi everyone!
I'm so glad that I finally managed to log on here! :-) Anyway, I just spoke to my neighbor, the insurance saleslady, about T.U.L.I.P. insurance for our festival. Unfortunately, her specialty is personal insurance, but she will gladly help us. When I asked her about T.U.L.I.P, she said that the only thing she does know about event insurance is that the person who fills out the paperwork for an event can use the liability on their homeowner's insurance for the event. I told her that we do not need to resort to that if we use T.U.L.I.P. The problem is that I forgot to tell her the exact coverage we need under it. However, she will look into it tomorrow. The good news is that I told her that our event will be in Jupiter on December 11. Yay!!!
P.S. I'm sorry for the months-long delay in posting here. Thank you for being patient with me!
-Lauren

The Supernovas are Born

Alright, it's been a while since we've updated.

Since last time, we've done a number of things.

Lauren, Juliana and I met with a Mr. Derrick Easely from Parks and Recreation on September 17th to discuss the event. We made a few changes to our set-up and toured the area we'll be having the event. I haven't heard back from him yet, but as far as I understand we have the park for December 11th from about 7am to 6pm. Prepare for that date NOW. In case you didn't notice, it's the Saturday before semester exams. It may not be the absolute best date choice, but it's the date we were able to get and we're sticking with it. For the love off all that is still sane in this world, PLEASE PLAN AHEAD FOR THIS. Okay? Okay. You have been warned.

Anyway, we're going to need this insurance called T.U.L.I.P. It's going to cover everything we need and will probably be our biggest single expense. If you know a lawyer, if you have any experience with this, if you know anyone who might know a lawyer or know someone who knows of someone who has done this... talk to them. It might make our lives a little easier. If you need to add more "knows someone who knows someone"s than I have there, though, just default to research online.

We can keep our bounce house and stage, as long as the stage is... on the smaller side. Which is fine, because that makes it easier for us. We're going to need to rent tables and chairs, but probably not too many. We might even be able to make due with what we have as a group.

If you're going to research food vendors or bounce houses (and you should get at least a few), make sure they have their own insurance. If it doesn't say on their website, don't be afraid to shoot them an email or call them. Part of this project is learning how to do things like that and the experience is really something good to have. They'll be glad you called.

At our meeting last week, we decided on a new name for our group and for the event (Supernovas). Don't forget that for the meeting this week, if you're artistic, try to sketch out something as an idea for tickets, posters, and flyers. If you're like me and have no artistic talent, write something up that will serve as the words on the posters. Make a few variations. Include what you think should be on there, whether it be facts about Be a Star, our cause, their cause, what the event will include, whatever. Try to make some that target parents and some that target children.

Just now I sent a message to Vanessa, requesting a letter as proof of our hours for CAS by November. When she gets back to me about it, I'll let you know.

Also, don't forget that if you're falling short on hours, you need to find another activity to get involved with. Next meeting I will bring an example of one of my CAS logs to base yours off of. If you haven't been keeping exact track, use this blog and the emails we've been communicating with! They should give you a pretty good idea of what we've done when.

I look forward to seeing you all in Ms. Pitton's room on the third floor Wednesday!

~Melissa

Another Update

Bad news, good news.

Bad news: We are almost definitely not going to get the dates we want for the event.

Good news: There's still some hope of getting something in the general area, either before or after.

More good news: I've been ensured that insurance will be relatively painless. We can't start that, though, until we submit the application and get the dates.

What I'm going to do is put the dates on top priority and alter the event based on what's available. Which includes a long conversation on the phone with Tom Landy and a set of possible dates to ask about.

I'm going to propose ANY date that falls on a weekend in the entire month of October. If they have an opening, we want it. What I need to know from you guys is if you're okay with sacrificing parts of our event (like the stage or bounce house) for the Halloween theme?

The other thing I need to know is what you all want to do in the event that there are no free dates in October. Tom said we're onto a great start by having the paperwork and stuff we have, but things like this book up very early on by annual organizations. Even if we come across an open date, he will need to call the organizations that have done events there in the past to make sure they weren't planning on using it. They get priority.

If we can't get October, I think we should weigh the pros and cons of a winter theme and a fall theme and choose one of them. If we do November, we'll go for what openings there are for what we want. For December, it will be within the first week or two so we can have it done before CAS is due.

I really need all of your feedback on this.

Pleeeeease discuss this here. We can't arrange another meeting, so this is your only chance to say anything about it. I'm going to call Mr. Landy back on Friday. I know it's not a lot of time, but that's the way it is.

-Melissa

Letter Approved

Success! As far as legal work, all we need now is insurance. I'm going to call Tom Landy (park manager) again tomorrow to ask him about what we'll need and where we need to go for it. If he says the date for the event (10/30) is free, I'm going to call my neighbor and ask her to see if we can start advertising soonish.

People who are handy with paint, crayons, pastels, and the like, start making ticket designs and signs and whatever. If you know someone artsy, ask them too. We're going with the name "Shadow Dancer's Festival", unless someone thinks they have a better name. Making tickets would be the way to get some of your hours if you're falling short. We've been waiting for a while, so a few of you probably are short. If you haven't been keeping track of hours, you need to start keeping that log because once school starts up we're going to be too busy and tired to even think about what we ate for breakfast during Psychology that morning, let alone what we did months ago, where, and for how long. I'm going to post an example of what your logs should look like using our main events (car washes, meetings with kids) and stuff so far.

Don't forget about our carwash coming up on August 7th! Tell everyone about it!!

I'll let you all know how the call with Tom Landy goes~ See ya!

~Melissa

Meeting of June

Okay, this is a bit late but it will give an update on what is happening this summer. Some answers are not completely clear yet as well as some of the dates. So for the people that could not attend the meeting this month here is what we discussed and how it all went down.
Car washes--- car washes have not been scheduled as yet; however, there should be some coming up. Hopefully another meeting should be happening where we can finalize a date. Maybe we can have a discussion on facebook or IM.
The club--- we are planning on making this CAS project into a club. Yes, we know, how cliché. But we're doing this for the good of this project. If we get the school thoroughly and officially involved, we get more public support, we could hand out flyers, and get other clubs involved to help us. Not to mention perhaps we can recruit underclassmen to keep this act of utter kindness alive. So the job here is to start thinking of catchy names, acronyms, symbols, and so on. So that when we sign up to make it a club we can have something to call it, instead of referring to the project as an "it". :) So if an idea strikes you feel free to post a comment for a name.
The major event of the year--- The art festival fundraiser. This is being held in October, however, this event is so big we might have to get this party started now. For those of you wondering what's happening in October, let me fill you in with another post.

Also just for the record, some CAS members did visit and volunteered at the St. Mary's hospital in June once in the month past. Those members do get hours for that and I heard the visit went well. :) Yay! Great job!
~~Celine~~

October event

This fundraiser will be held at a park, the name of it escapes me but once I get that tidbit I'll put it in. This park will be ours for the second or first Saturday in October. It will have fun games and crafts for kids and little booths where parents could come out and buy things for the fundraiser and what not. Sounds fun right? Well we have many things planned so I'll list the things we need to get done and some of the ideas and activities we want to have during the fundraiser.

Build a stage--- this is for a few speakers to come out periodically throughout the day either to thank people for coming, inform people about the event or the cause etc. Therefore, the task would be to get a stage built and get speakers, if anyone knows some important people or someone associated with the project in anyway try to get them to attend as a speaker. (We also need materials and a person who knows how to work power tools without sawing off a finger for our stage)

Games--- we'll also be making some of the games out of wood, if you have any games in mind that you find fun comment so we can brainstorm a few.
Arts and crafts--- face painting, egg dying (orange and black), pumpkin decorating, stuff like that, keep to brain storming for that as well.

Special effects and features: fog machine, decorations, music, bounce house, sliming, pie booth, prizes for games (glow sticks, colored hair spray, plastic toys, you know), program with the speakers and activities with a map of the park and stations on the back, lost and found area. Not all these things will be possible to accomplish for the event, but this is the brainstorming we did. Some of the things like sliming or pie booth, which would be fun but very messy, may not be feasible unless we find a creative way to make it safe and clean. At the next meeting, we'll divide these different items and tasks among the group so we can get it started.

Cut out boards for photos--- this is with the pictures with the faces cutout and people put their faces in the holes and take funny pictures. We need to brain storm something fun for a picture and get that started.
Tickets--- for the event would need to be sold way in advance as well as advertising such as flyers. (This probably does not have to be done so early in the game, but it's a major component of the event). So things needed to be printed are the tickets, flyers, and program schedule with the map on the back.

Advertising--- it would be good to meet with schools near the park, the location of this place has also escaped my memory. (I'll fill it in once I get this info too) Yes, so meeting with schools to get the word out about the event and perhaps get permission to sell tickets at a discounted price to the event. Also advertise the event in places young children and parents mill about, like libraries, grocery stores, etc. We'll even get posters up at our school once we become a club. And Juliana said she'll handle getting an ad in the newspaper.(this may be too early for advertising, but it's something to keep in mind)

Volunteers: Yes, I know you're thinking what a lot of work this is going to be. But let me just inform you that we will have help. Right now we have ten people in our group alone. However, in the next school year we will have much more as a club and we'll have other clubs such as the art club involved with some of the things they specialize in. (photography club will even be there to record the event for us and art club would be there to make the cutout board, the face painting, and all that jazz). So no pressure, we'll get it done.

Shirts: for the event we'll have matching shirts which we'll decorate so people would recognize the volunteers when we are there at the event. At each booth or station there will be the needed number of volunteers, (face painting booth, ticket selling booth, lost and found booth) you get the gist. Which gives you a slight idea of the large number of people we'll have to be recruited. Since making this event possible is a serious job, consider the people who can work hard and follow directions as possible volunteers.

Pledges: Okay someone asked if anyone in this project was involved in iWalk and I believe that we discussed getting the CAS members involved in iWalk to raise money for our project through pledges for the cause. Still, this is not actually decided yet.

Food--- Saving the best last. We need to contact venders so that we get these event goers some grub.

Okay, so this is all that we discussed, please ask questions about anything you are unsure about. If you can fill me in on the names of some of the things I missed or perhaps the information I may have gotten twisted, that would be greatly appreciate. I hope to get a meeting in this month soon, even though Melissa is not here right now to attend, just to get a date to some things like a car wash finalized if possible. Or we can wait until she gets back too, that's good, but we still need to talk about it. :)
Okay bye!
~~~CeLiNe~~~

General Updates and Brain Storming (Bullets at the bottom of the bulk of text for you tl;dr folk)

Since it's summer, and we all have off of school, I have a proposition. Our group has grown to nearly ten people, which is incredibly awesome, but when it comes to volunteering as a group in the hospital it's just too many. For those of you who were there when we met the children the first time, our space was limited and at times it was awkward because we had extras that didn't have much to do (there were, after all, only two children that really participated, and there were 5 of us). My suggested solution is to, of course, break us up into different meetings.

We can only visit on weekdays, and I want to say that we shouldn't send more than three or four people per meeting.

I've called the Child life Institute to ask when we can volunteer again, but Rachel wasn't in. When she calls back, I'm going to see what suggestions she has (maybe they have some other things we can help out with so we can send more people at once).

The first dates I'm going to ask for are Tuesday (6/15) and Thursday (6/17) and with the same times as last time. We lasted from about 12pm-3pm, but we could have stayed even longer. *(see edit) The people who drive themselves can play it by year, but everyone else plan on a three hour visit.

We also should break it up so that there is always someone around who knows some Spanish. Yes, I'm looking at you, Lauren and Juliana. Possibly you, too, Kat (if you're fluent and willing~). At first, let's try to revolve the people going. If transportation is not a problem for you, let me know and we'll put you on the backup list. If there's a day we schedule, and we weren't able to get three or four people to go, you'll be the one that can jump in for extra time. That way we can keep it fair and not-crowded. For the sake of organization and management, though, either Juliana or myself will probably be at every meeting until more of us get familiar with the people we're interacting with and the fine details of what we're doing. The less confusion the better.

CRAFT IDEAS! YOU HAS THEM, YES? We're looking for something that doesn't need to be incredibly structured. Last time, we started with aliens and ended up with jewelery and eyes glued to our foreheads. The kids were kind of mushy in spirit at first, so also think of something that doesn't need an incredible amount of energy - physical or mental. Be creative! This is the best part of our project!

Also, on the note of crafts...how should we be paying for craft supplies for these meetings? Should we all chip in, I dunno, $10 and budget that to last the summer or should we dip into our earnings thus far and use that? I think we should avoid taking anything out that isn't for the actual festival, but I don't want to have to ask you all to pay, either. Your thoughts and opinions?



TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read, for future reference)
- Any suggestions on how to break up our group so we don't have too many people at the hospital at once?
- Any craft ideas? Our age group is pretty young.
- When we buy craft supplies, should we dip into our earnings thus far, or should we chip in as a group and buy them with our own money?

THESE are the pressing questions at this point!

Also, I spoke with Vanessa, and she's waiting on their lawyer to find out about the insurance part of the park permit before they give us the paperwork we need. I thought we would have to do it ourselves, but I guess we'll wait to see what they have to say.

Hope that wasn't too much to read!

With love and stuff,
~Melissa

*EDIT: Okay, so, I talked to Rachel, and we're on for THURSDAY (6/17) at 1:30pm!!! We need SIX PEOPLE to come. And a parent. They're going to break us up into two groups of three. They ask that we do something sort of similar to last time and bring a parent, again, but this time without the siblings. Apparently the reason we need a parent is because we aren't registered as volunteers with the hospital. We'll have to work on that.

WHO CAN COME?