Student Carnation Sales Help Hearts and Hands
On Valentine’s Day last week, students in Dr. Pittaway’s Applied Small Business class raised just over $400 by selling carnations. This was the class’ first fundraiser of the semester with proceeds benefiting Statesboro’s Hearts and Hands Clinic. Hearts and Hands clinic is a Volunteers in Medicine Alliance. It is a free clinic for those who are uninsured in the Statesboro area. With 20% of Georgia’s population being unemployed, they have quite a feat to accomplish. The clinic is open to see patients two Tuesdays a month by a general practitioner and if they need additional, specific care there are 12 specialists who see patients, free of charge, during their office hours. Hearts and Hands also has 13 dentists that volunteer their time, space and equipment to taking care of patients. Everything that patient needs is taken care of by the clinic from filing claims and paperwork to providing free prescriptions.
Georgia Southern Students at the fundraiser. Hannah Shedd, committee HR representative, is using her social networking to inform additional students about the Hearts and Hands Clinic and benefiting fund raising.
This is where Dr. Pittaway’s class comes in; the class has been split in to two groups, one has the goal of raising 5,000 pounds of food for Campbell’s Let’s Can Hunger initiative and the other group has been charged with raising $5,000 for the Hearts and Hands clinic. But, in the spirit of small business the groups are being graded on the innovation of their fundraising/can raising events and how successful their events are in obtaining their goals, among other criteria decided by the acting CEOs of each initiative.
The carnation sale was the first event of either group to be generated after just one month of class. The Hearts and Hands fund raising committee wanted to accrue capital early on in order to have extra cash in order to invest in upcoming events and to boost group confidence. The idea to sell flowers on Valentine’s day was suggested in one of the first brainstorming meetings, the thinking being that there would be several Georgia Southern male professors, faculty and students who would have forgotten the significance of February 14.
When approached to buy a flower for the charity one man responded, “Why do I need a flower? Who would I give it to?”
To which Matt Chambers, the CEO of the fund raising committee simply stated, “You’re wife?”
And a light bulb went off in the professors head when he realized that this Monday was not just any ordinary Monday, but that it was, in fact , Valentine’s day.
Applied Small Business students, Brittanie Barber, Portia Dickerson, Whitney Long, and Scott Martin, man the table in Georgia Southern’s Coca-Cola Plaza selling carnations.
The carnations were given to the group at a discount by The Flower Girl, a local flower shop in Statesboro located on Buckhead Dr. and over the course of 5 hours $400 were raised by donation and flower sales. If you are interested in the cause, please look to this website for upcoming events and also connect to the effort on facebook at:
http://www.causes.com/causes/572452
Posted in Teaching and Learning