Open House

The open house was Saturday, and I have to say, it was a rousing success.


Saturday kicked off with the dedication of the Commons after former Starfish board member Rick Webster. It was Rick who had the original vision for what this building could be and his tenacity for making the project happen that brought it about. Sadly, Rick passed away late last summer before we'd even gotten the final green light to do the renovation.


Rick was the most excited about turning the garage into the Commons, and so, it was only fitting that we officially dedicated and named the room as the Rick and Patti Webster Commons.


The afternoon was full of great tours of the building with many of our current and incoming Scholars, mentors and donors. It just goes to show that good planning leads to good events. All the hardwork totally paid off.


A few photos from the morning's dedication:

The photo on top is the general view of the new Commons. The photo on the right is representatives from each of the businesses who donated to make this project happen.

This last photo is Starfish founder Mike Feeney with Patti Webster, presenting her with a copy of the plaque that names the Commons after Rick and her.

Friday's Docket

On day 1 after the breakfast I still have a fairly full docket -- though it's nothing like the last few weeks.

Today's top job: Find the surface of my desk.
#2. Put all the breakfast planning material in a folder for next year.
#2.5 Write a press release about the breakfast.
#3. Make a to-do list for next week of all the things that haven't gotten done because of the breakfast.
#4. Make thank you/follow-up phone calls to guests who attended yesterday's breakfast.
#5. Send thank you letters/receipts to all new donors from the breakfast.

Oh -- and I have less than two weeks left as a VISTA now.

The Breakfast

Went off fabulously.

Everybody who I talked to said they loved it (that's including people who had no idea I was planning it.)

We're getting ready to count the money.

I'll update with more info, hopefully later this afternoon. If I can stay awake. (it was an early morning...)

3:20 p.m update:
We've counted the money and the pledges and have a preliminary total.

Drum roll please...........

We raised more than $200,000.

We know there are guests who said they would mail in a donation later, so it's hardly a final total yet.

But, adding the breakfast donations to what I've raised this year in grants, the money total is now $412,000!

With a few outstanding grant applications still out there, I'm still really hopeful that I'll cross the 500K mark before the end of my VISTA service.

T Minus -->

Note the new countdown ticker on the sidebar tracking the time left to the breakfast. (The widget isn't working quite right...)

Nevertheless, the point remains.

I am completely busy with this.

If you look at the bottom page, in other countdown news, I apparently only have 16 days of VISTA service left.

Updates (or look out Tokyo)

So I promised updates and then got swamped.


Here they are now.

My new(er) computer at work is so very much better than my old one. The old one would, sometime between 2:30-3 p.m. each day, get so bogged down in its processing that the whole machine would lock up. I couldn't run Publisher and a photo program at the same time. If I got an e-mail with an attachment, the whole system would get sluggish until my Outlook dinged at me that I had a new message. After two days with the new computer, I haven't had any of these problems once I got my e-mail up and running again.

Our big fundraiser breakfast is in a week. Technically, by this time next Thursday, the breakfast will be over. (It's only one hour, from 7:30-8:30 a.m. The rest of the day we'll be counting up money!)

Anyway, with the event just a week away, I am doing little else but prep work for that. (Save for writing a short grant that has to get done too!) I'm putting guests at tables, I'm printing up pledge cards, I'm making table tents, I'm making the PowerPoint recognition slides. I have a seating chart on my wall, with 45 tables drawn in marker. I'm fairly set on about 22 of them (only 23-28 more to go, depending on numbers.)

It's a huge amount of work. I sort of understand why brides turn into bride-zilla when planning this kind of a large event. The pressure to make it perfect is intense. I quipped to a friend that I was turning into fundraiser-zilla...

After the Roof Stunt

With the roof stunt over, things are getting back to normal here at Starfish HQ -- though what "normal" is will change again.

We've got about a week and a half left with our awesome summer VISTAs before they head back to college this fall. They have been amazing and gotten so much great capacity-building work done.

Also, in about a month, we'll start having regular homework club again meaning we'll have Scholars here on weeknights which can be fun.

I'm back to proposal writing -- turned in one yesterday and working on another preliminary proposal that needs to go out by the end of this week. Also I'm busy with the planning for our fall fundraising breakfast. Things need to be in motion for that now to make sure we have a good event later.

Also, I'm doing some revisions to the capital grant to help that process. It's not dead, just tabled and I still have high hopes for this office not being blue for my entire year of service.

Grant Cycles or why I'm hibernating in May

Grant applications come in cycles.

If you recall, back in November and December, I was churning out about one proposal a week. Everybody, it seemed, had deadlines between Nov. 30 and Jan. 15. For a while then, the grant proposal writing slowed down.

Until now. Now I am deep in the throes of the spring grant cycle. Everybody wants stuff between May 15 and June 30 for the summer funding cycle. On my to-do list for this week, there are no less than four grants that I should work on. The goal is to write two and save the other two for next week.

The problem with the non-stop grant writing is the chained-to-my-desk feeling. I eat lunch at my desk. I sit at my desk and write all day. Not too many meetings, not even pestering other colleagues for information or data. I've done that already. Now comes just the sheer task of putting words on paper, one after the other to form coherent, compelling sentences.

In the applications that I'm writing and submitting this month alone, we're talking total funds somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000. That's a quarter-million. All in one month.

Never mind the two newsletters, database work, photo editing and prep work for our summer VISTAs coming next week. (more on that later...)

Add to the grant writing I'm doing the things I'm doing in real life (launching a writers group, teaching a four-day writers workshop, working on my own book, planning a trip in June, etc), it's pretty clear why I'm feeling a bit whelmed by all this. (Note, not overwhelmed, not yet anyway... just whelmed.)

So, I guess I should stop blogging and get to the grant writing. Maybe that would make this all feel a little less hectic.

I'm available for weddings...

I've spent my afternoon addressing envelopes.

Quite literally, the entire afternoon. In fact, I had no idea it was 4:45 p.m already. The fact that people were leaving the office should have been a clue, but it didn't sink in until just now when I looked at the clock. (My first thought was, "My clock is wrong!" that's how absorbed I was.)

Starfish is having a reception about a month from now at the home of one of our donors. More than 80 invitations are going out for this reception and they are all hand addressed.

I could have been done with this project already, I suppose, if I'd done labels. But even with a nice font, a label (or printing on to the envelope), still looks like a label.

Who doesn't like to open a hand-addressed card?

Direct mail studies have proven that a handwritten address will get your mail opened more often than pieces that look like bulk mail (aka, junk mail).

So this afternoon, I put aside the grant writing, picked up my nice Pilot V5 Rolling Ball pen and remembered how to write in cursive. At 60-some done, I'm calling it a day (and going home to ice my tired hand... kidding).

But maybe I could recover from my year of no-money-with-VISTA by freelancing as a wedding invitation addresser...

Do you have a rheuoom?

Today I have felt a bit like Inspector Clouseau today from the old Pink Panther movie sketch. I've been making calls about rooms. (Anybody else know the scene I'm talking about, when Clouseau is in an inn, and is asking the manager if he has a "rheuoom" in his terrible French accent.)

It's time for Starfish to start planning out fall fundraising breakfast and to get started, we first need to find a space to hold it. I've been on the phone most of the morning with conference centers, hotels and other venues here in Indy, trying to find the right location for space, price, menu options, parking availability, etc. for a breakfast of 500 people.

This is actually more complicated and time consuming than I would have expected. I've never be part of the planning before for an event with 500 people coming, so my expectations were completely unfounded. It's quite the industry, it seems, this convention and meeting space and catering business. Anyway, onward to review some information that I received about one possible venue via email.

When I can update on details, I will