All For The Babies....

In December, Hunter's Mommy, Carissa and I decided that we were going to participate in the March of Dimes, March for Babies on May 12, 2012.  We wanted to get family and friends involved and walk as a team.  Team "Hunter's Heart" was born.....

Because I work for one of the St. Vincent hospitals, I decided that I was some how going to involve my fellow associates in the this all important and very close to my heart, endeavor.  So I decided to approach the leaders of our Senior Administration with the possibility of this being an "approved" charity drive, especially since St. Vincent Women's Hospital was a sponsor. :)  It was approved and I had the go ahead to distribute information and the opportunity to recruit additional walkers, as well as donations.

I started my "Did You Know" series during Congenital Heart Defect (CHD) Awareness Week, Feb.  7-14th.  I shared facts concerning CHD's, and shared pictures and a little history about Hunter and included a small heart shaped sucker in the first edition, just in time for Valentine's Day.  Our first donation, one of the largest, came shortly after I sent out the first edition!  That was quite exciting! I sent out a new edition approximately every 3 weeks.  It was almost 2 months before we received another donation.

Twice a day I passed by the McDonald's in New Palestine and noticed that they seemed to have quite a few evenings where they did fundraising for different school groups. Hmmm, I wondered if we could do that for March of Dimes, too? After a few attempts, I was able to finally make contact with the manager of fundraising and we were approved to have our evening!  It was set for May 6, the Sunday before Mother's Day.  McDonald's would give us 10% of all sales for 4 hours.  We made copies of flyers from March of Dimes, and created donation envelopes to place on every table and  folded change donation boxes.

Several weeks before our date, we went door to door at several of the businesses in New Palestine and hung flyers to alert people to our special evening at McDonald's.  We had family members place the information on their facebook pages to get the word out to our friends and family, hoping to bring in a good crowd.

Because our fundraising date was close to the walk date, and Carissa had designed a team shirt, we were able to wear them for our fundraiser.  To help spread our reason for walking we greeted guests and thank them for coming in and supporting March of Dimes.  Most customers had no idea and looked at us quite strange when we thanked them, but once they understood they seemed to be pleased to help us.
Hunter was with us,of course, wearing his team shirt too and met many of the customers and quickly put a smile on their face.

We had a great turn out of customers, friends and family members.  Our fundraiser check was $118 for the evening, but from additional donations from customers we raised a total of $575.13!! 

Here are a few pictures from our evening at McDonald's-

Here is our team accepting the check presented to us from McDonald's