It is time for us to start seriously thinking about the financial end of adopting. We know that we want to adopt, but we need to decide if we actually can. The cost of another adoption looks like a really large mountain that will be tough to climb, if not impossible.
A loan is really not much of an option since we took out a large loan to finish Baby Boy's adoption and we will be paying on that for years to come. The grants are unrealistic. We tried for some of them when we adopted Baby Boy. There are thousands and thousands of families competing to get these grants. Most will go to people adopting special needs children. Almost all go to Christian families with strong ties to a church. We are Christian... but we aren't members of a church. That leaves us out of the running for a good number of grants, including one available just within our state. I don't think we will even bother applying this time around.
We sat down and figured up how much we could save in the next year or two to put toward adoption. In the end we would still need another 11 or 12 thousand dollars. We would need to get creative and find ways to raise the money. We did some fundraising with Baby Boy's adoption and that was a big help.
Some of the fundraiser we did were:
*Spaghetti dinner and basket auction. We actually managed to raise $3500 at this event. We sold tickets for $15 each. The food was all donated and prepared by the local Elk's lodge. They also let us use their lodge free of charge. The big money maker was the basket auction. We got donations to create the baskets and had a silent auction. There were a couple of sports themed baskets with tickets to local pro sporting events donated by the teams as well as jersey's, autographed balls and other memorabilia. We had a "romantic getaway" basket that had a donated weekend stay at a local hotel complete with a free prime rib dinner. We also had bubble bath and candles and wine glasses in that basket. The "day of beauty" basket had gift certificates for haircut and style, mani/pedi, facial and some lotions and manicure set. We had ideas for other baskets, but didn't get around to getting donations for all of them. I would have liked to have had a kids themed basket and a "night at the movies" basket.
*We made cross necklaces and sold them for $10 each. We made about $500 with that.
*We raised about $300 with the Little Light of Mine candle fundraiser.
*We also made around $200 with CurrentFun's online fundraiser.
*Bookcodex.com lets you set up an "online mall" and when people shop through your links you get a percentage of the sales. We had one set up to help raise money. A friend has one right now to help fund her Guatemala adoption. Click here to see her online mall.
*A lady that sells Pampered Chef let me have a "party" and earn money for the adoption rather than free items. That was around $90 if I remember right.
*It was a lot of hard work, but we put together a local celebrity softball game. We made about $1500 from that. It took a lot of time and effort to make this one happen. We had hoped for better results, but really we were happy to have the 1500.
*We had a couple of garage sales that brought in a few hundred and sold some stuff on Ebay too. I hate selling on Ebay though, it is just too iffy. We got $150 out of a lot of boys pants that I sold, but then we got only $5 out of a large lot of girls shirts I sold.
*Of course we also did the old standby of saving change in a jar. We cashed it in anytime we had another set of fees due and used it toward what was due. It helped. You would be surprised how much you can save this way. I started doing this again just last week and have about $25 in our adoption fund.
*Several friends and family members and even my employer donated to our adoption fund. That was such an amazing blessing that we are forever grateful for. I don't think we can expect that this time around, and I am okay with that because it was so generous for them to do this before and I wouldn't feel right having them do it again.
We will need to get even more creative this time around. I am not sure how much people will be willing to buy tickets to events or shop at online fundraisers this time around. I kind of feel like people will feel that they already did that for us once and won't want to do it again.
Does anyone have any good fundraising ideas? Have you had any success with an adoption fundraiser?
