for 3+ years now, i've been involved in fund-raising for
PC. what i do is really quite minimal, it's mostly admin stuff, and playing the 'chaser' rather than doing the thinking and moving. i've stopped counting how much i dug into the pockets every year. once or twice, i did gripe about the futility of ever escaping this. it's definitely easier to just donate money than sacrifice the time and effort to come up with an activity to raise the money. even so, i was at one time starting to resent why we had to keep donating. especially when our pockets were not deep. yet i did also feel the unfairness for the higher-level people, who're kinda expected to dig even deeper. it's like an unspoken rule. so some people would refuse to contribute at all. tbh, i've secretly wished that the department fail to raise the targetted sum. i guess we won't be penalised if we never did achieve it. but we always managed to raise what we're tasked to raise. and we usually exceeded the amount. i guess i was curious to see what would happen if one department really failed to raise the money. would they be 'marked' for it...?
anyway, i suppose you can say i had too little faith in our kind... i tend to take it personally since i'm the rep. but that's missing the entire picture by bitching about such petty issues.
since 2 or so years back, we'd kickstarted the fund-raising real early. made sense anyway. it's a mad rush this year, what with the office renovations and the
transformation (we have to get busy again moving back to the old office space). my spirited colleagues put up a great event this year. i mean, they did great every year, for the past years. many of us still resorted to selling foodstuffs as it's low-effort. but that also meant small profit margins. i once tried consigning uncle tony's sunglasses and potted cactus from a guy also named tony. it wasn't a huge success... (you see, i 'd felt like a failure. it's quite an experience doing it, though. maybe it'd be a better success if someone else did the sales and marketing :P) oh well!
back to my colleagues. they sold confectionery and flowers and ice cream and sang songs. it's the song dedication and performance that drew in the big bucks. the big boss was so touched someone dedicated her a song (it's the smaller boss under her supervision and the song's Carpenters' Close To You) she dedicated a song to each cluster. that's about 20 songs (sorry i can't recall the total number of clusters...). apart from this, we received support from some very generous donors. i can never have thought up all these. sometimes i wonder if i can ever achieve anything worthy of mention. i'm not saying this to thrash myself. it's just the truth.
i leave you with this clip i recorded, of the bunch who'd put in much time and energy to raise funds for the needy. well done, guys!
i received those pretty flowers from some colleagues. very touched. thanks for the lovely gesture.
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