We hear you about your situation where just a few folks do the work. Thought I'd pass along a few of our more popular articles on building parent involvement. MIght give your group a little boost:
I know that this is a very old post but I just discovered this forum.
We held our first holiday shoppe this past school year and will not do one again. We didn't expect to make a ton of money but we ended up losing about $300 from it. We used a company that sent everything and we paid for what we sold. What we didn't count on was students stealing stuff.
Also, we only have about 15 parent members in our organization. And no one wants to volunteer. The bulk of the work falls on myself and my treasurer. It just so happened that the week we did the shop, she had the flu. LOL AND cookie dough came in that week. It was madness.
Won't be doing it again anytime soon. But I LOVE the idea of bringing vendors in to sell items.
With 40% of our kids receiving free & reduce lunch this year, we decided that rather than asking for kids to pay for anything our PTSO would sponsor a kids holiday craft shoppe. We are purchased an instamatic camera, photo frame craft kids, fleece to make scarves and are also donating some holiday ornaments we've had in storage for years. Each child can come in and be helped to make a present for a family member and then wrap & tag it before taking it home.
Who needs more plastic junk from China? What our families need is a more loving kindness from others!
For our Santa Secret shop we buy online from catalogs and party suppliers. It is really cheap. we get fun things like snowman rings, silly necklaces, #1 dad and mom pins. After we get everything in we leave one thing of each item out and wrap the rest using numbers for prices (#1 .25, #2 .50, #3 .75 ect) this elimenates they need for many volunteers to come in and help wrap. The children grab a shopping bag, pick the item they'd like, then grab the wrapped ones. The children pay no more than $1 for Items. One child shopped for 15 people and didn't pay over $10. Alot of the company's we bought from was Oriental Trading, Party City, Places like that. Shop after christmas you get great deals and have all year to wrap the items!
We got rid of our Santa shop this year. We didn't have enough volunteers to dedicate a few days and most importantly we thought the stuff we were selling was simply junk. You could get many of those items at the Target dollar spot.
We replaced the event with a winter dance including DJ. We sold concessions and our art teacher coordinated a beautiful family craft project. We did have a visit from Santa and he passed out glow stick necklaces. We were especially delighted to see many of the older siblings and former students taking pictures with Santa on their cell phones.
It was a much nicer way to celebrate winter with families than trying to sell them dollar store items. We made some money because we charged a small fee for entry fee and concessions
