Preparation for the Washington, D.C. trip took awhile, but all the hard work paid off. When we first started preparing for the trip we had to figure out strategies for raising money, we thought about car washes which didn’t work because it was the end of winter and barely spring.

So, we had to figure out fundraisers we can do that won’t have any problems. So we chose to do bake sales and solicit for donations. The first bake sale we did was where we asked parents to donate baked goods and bring them to the school.We ended up with a variety of things to sell.

For example, we had rice krispies, all kinds of cookies, cakes, cupcakes, and even chips and candy. Since we got a nice variety of baked goods donated, we were expecting to make a large amount of money. Parents, children, and others supported us and bought goods. By the end of the day, we had a small amount of our merchandise left but we still needed to sell the remainder.

That Thursday, we counted the money and we had about $150, but we planned on raising $350. The money we raised was good, but we still needed more money to reach our goal of $4,000.

To raise more money we had to brainstorm more ways to earn the money. We thought about inquiring for donations. If we were going to do this we had to plan who we were going to solicit. We were going to solicit friends, church members, and relatives. One of the students, Bakare Awakoaiye, 7th grade, went to his church, Wo’se Community Church, and created a presentation about the trip and at the end solicited donations. Also, another student Dante Johnson, 6th grade, went to his church, Revelation Christian Fellowship in San Leandro, and requested for donations. We all participated in solicting for donations which helped us raise even more money towards our trip.

After soliciting our close sources to obtain more donations we attended Diamano Coura's (a world re-known dance company) performance. We weren't at the performance just to solicit donations, the boys in our class were also drumming in the show. This helped us earn donations because people were able to see us and our talents. Before the show, we set up a booth with the information for our trip and created custom designed brochures and donation envelopes to collect the money.The brochures were created by a student, Aminah Muhammad, using Microsoft Word and Microsoft Publisher. We made about $250 but our goal was $1,000 so, in spite of all the the money we made that night we needed more. When we found out we needed more to make our last amount of money, we had one more bake sale where bakeries around Oakland donated cakes for us to sell. The bakeries were Montclair Bakery, Bake Sale Betty,and the Safeway Bakeries in Montclair and Rockridge.

We contacted the bakeries and made deals with them and they were nice enough to give us some cakes.That Thursday and Friday we held the bake sale where we sold whole cakes and slices of cake. We raised a pleasant amount and we reached most of our goal for our trip. At the end of all of our fundraisers, we made most of our money for the trip and we had a lot of people who helped out with everything.