Our PTO sponsors recycling aluminum soda tabs, of course tabs are on other products as well. We will collect them at the end of the year, weighing each teachers jar, with a class party for the class that weighs in the most tabs. We take the tabs to our local recycling center and take the money earned and donate 100% of the money to the local Ronald McDonald House Program.
Unless there is a student or family in our school that goes to the hospital already for whatever reason, we would donate that money for there hospital expenditures.
At Thanksgiving time we did a food drive for the community that started out just to be for school families. We had so much donated that we were able to open it out to anyone in need in the community, whether they had a child at our school or not.
In the past, we would sell Candy Canes during lunch time in the month of December and use the profits to buy grocery and gas gift cards for families in need. This year we set up a "Giving Tree" in our Holiday shop and asked kids to donate their change. The children would take a dollar or two and slip it through a slot in a wooden tree a parent had made that resembled the book The Giving Tree. We doubled our collections from the candy cane effort of previous years thanks to our generous children (and a couple of family donations.
Our schools do a variety of fundraising for causes. In the elementary, it's usually a non-perishable food drive. Our local recreation complex donates a free swim session to the class that brings in the most items. The food bank sends their truck twice to load up the donations. We also have a hats, mittens, socks drive. Our PTO alternates between a pet food and supplies drive and hosting one family fun night where admission is one grocery item per family member.
Some of the upper grades have penny wars or coin drives. There's one going on right now at the middle school for Haiti. They will also be holding a couple of bake sales.
For every fundraising activity we have we try to do three community service projects (we have over 2,000 students in our school so our community is large). We had a canned food drive at the beginning of the year, a book drive and donated the books to three local nonprofits, a blood drive with the Red Cross twice per year, a health fair, campus and community clean-up days in the spring and the fall and currently collecting toiletries for the people of Haiti and will donate them to CARE.
We run a food bank right at the school that is open for 45 minutes once a week, people only have to sign in to office as a PTO volunteer and no other questioned ask. The nurse also ives us names of families that are receptive to receiving a backpack fill with items for the weekend. We do penies for patients or now pennies for haiti.
