Jog-A-Thon

I was one of my neice's jog-a-thons' several years ago and thought I would set one up at the school I used to be a director at. I decided we would donate the money to women and children in third world countries instead of using it for our school. The first year we raised over $21,000 to build water pumps in South Africa, the second year we raised over $13,000 to help build schools in South Africa, last year we raised over $11,000 to give small business loans to women throughout the world, for immunizations, to teach women about nutrition and health care for their children, and various other things. This year we were raising money for an organization called Free Wheelchair Mission. Each chair costs $48.35. I run the jog-a-thon every year and spend a lot of time the two or three months before it ordering t-shirts, getting the paperwork ready to make sure every single person at the school knows about it, making posters, going from clasroom to classroom once a week getting the kids motivated, getting a speaker from the organization to talk to the kids...it's not really hard since I have the paperwork done and jsut have to alter it year to year. It does take a lot of time though, especially since I am carrying Sasha around from class to class and can only do some of the paperwork things whie she is napping. But this was another great year. We had a lot of fun and we raised over $15,000. I am still in the process of collecting the money and doing a few wrap up things. I found a magazine who will print an article on our jog-a-thons. Now I jsut have to write it up. I wrote up a How to Run a Jog-a-thon Booklet and have been giving to the organizations we run for.
One of the really fun things is that my kids run in the jog-a-thon. Colton ran in the first one, Brayden ran last year and this year, and this yera the two year old classes ran so Brookelyn was in it. It was great! Very cool to see every student and every staff member wearing a jog-a-thon shirt and participating in it. The students who ran in it were from two years old up through eighth grade.