Fundraising is an important activity for all organizations. Environmental groups need money to buy things for projects and help pay for guest speakers. It can be challenging though to raise money through sustainable means. Charging a small amount of money for your event can raise the audience's expectation level while raising the bar on your own presentation. This blog post will outline five ideas on how to do green fundraising.
1. Selling food is a great way to raise money. One idea is to buy fresh fruit and use a juice press (like this one) to create fresh fruit juice with reusable plastic cups to serve the juice in. This idea has a high initial cost, but would make money in the long run. A similar idea is to sell produce from a club garden.
Initial purchase:
- Fruit press
- Plastic cups (or borrowed from dining hall)
Subsequent purchases + time:
- Buying and washing fruit
- Washing cups
2. Selling items like T shirts, apparel, reusable water bottles, or mugs which advertise the school or club are a great way to raise money. Make sure to check that these items are not sold in the school store.
Here is a well worn water bottle from middle school which was created by the environmental club: Reusable water bottles always make great gifts!
3. Replacing old appliances with energy efficient ones can create long term savings for the institution. Similarly, having a dark day of enlightenment series could also save large amounts of power.
[1]
4. Fair Trade is company which promotes sustainable and ethical farming. Hosting a fair trade campaign is a great way to generate revenue. In middle school, my club and I organized a Fair Trade campaign. This was a huge hit and we sold many of their goods while raising money for the club.
5. Redeeming bottles may seem like a good idea and perhaps it is for your group, but I have always found it to be too time intensive. For example, on four occasions, a friend and I collected a full recycling bin of only redeemable bottles and cans and brought it to be redeemed.
It took 30 minutes of sorting beforehand, 30 minutes to bring to a store, and 30- 60 minutes in the store. The local store we used always had a line for the machines. Also, the machines would get filled and have to be emptied, or jammed which would cause further delays. Another problem was the messiness of the bottles. For example, unfinished bottles would leak making our clothes and the bin dirty. Perhaps your experience will different. Each trip made about 15 dollars. If you can incorporate redeeming into another store trip, this avenue may be worth exploring. Even if you can not redeem the bottles, it is still important to keep recycling!
Total profit from glass bottles:
Our full recycling bin:
Thank you for reading and I hope these ideas will help you raise money!
Citations:
