One of the joys of being in a volunteer organisation is that we have to raise our own funds, we don’t just get money thrown at us. Our Group doesn’t own its own buildings so we are not constantly having to raise money to pay for its upkeep. Having your own buildings are both a blessing and a curse as you have the flexibility of having the full use of the building whenever the Group wants, but they are a tremendous financial burden. The same applies to mini buses. We’ve had three at various times in the past and very useful they were too, but we didn’t use them often enough to justify them and we didn’t have a secure place to keep them.
But no matter what you own, you have to have a healthy bank balance to ensure that the Beavers, Cubs and Scouts have all the equipment they need.
This year we’ve been offered the opportunity to do some bag packing at Sainsbury’s the weekend before Christmas. Now personally, I HATE bag packing. This has a lot to do with the 13 years I spent working for Asda and the fact I spent my 30th birthday doing it on my day off! However, putting my personal grumbles aside, we cannot pass up this opportunity to fund raise in this way as I’m guessing that we will be able to make around £1500 or more over the two days! If this guess is correct then we won’t need to do any more fundraising in the coming year unless we come up with idea that’s going to cost a lot!
So that weekend will see me bag packing and hopefully collecting loads of cash for the Group, not my favourite way of spending a weekend, but the outcome will be worthwhile.