20 Time Reflection

Hayley and I did a costume collecting fundraiser at the local dance studio where I teach. We chose to focus on donating dance costumes because it’s a shared experience for both of us, as we were both in cheer and saw firsthand the costs of doing an activity you love. I grew up doing dance and have easily spent thousands of dollars on costumes alone. Some of my dance friends had to give up their dreams of becoming professional dancers because the cost is so astronomical. Dance is so important and beautiful, it would be a tragedy if any kid weren’t able to pursue this art because of rising costs.

Our goal was to promote awareness for the cause, collect costumes to donate so we could make a concrete contribution, and also work on our event planning skills as well as organizational skills. Initially, we did not have a set plan, but through a lot of careful thinking, we decided a fundraiser would be the most effective way to get the community involved while also making a difference.

We had trouble with planning the event at first. We are both pretty busy people, so planning a date that worked was very tough. We thought we had a day that worked, but we realized a couple days before that we planned it on Easter Sunday, so we had to change that. Eventually, we had a successful event. We played games, planned fun little activities, and taught a dance combo. We had around 25 girls show up and we collected a TON of costumes, which we donated to Traveling Tutus, an organization based in Florida that provides costumes to low-income communities around the world.

We learned a lot about planning, especially paying close attention to detail. We also learned about how to advertise an event, utilizing flyers and also electronic means of communication to get our voices out there. It’s not always easy to keep control of a large group of young girls. We had to seriously plan our activities so there was no downtime, as well as find fun and engaging games, clean music, and choreograph and teach a dance. If we could do this again, we would want to make the event bigger and more successful. With more time, we could have planned something in the public park and accessed more communities, such as coordinating with local elementary schools. I also would have broadened past just dance, including theater costumes or even sports uniforms for low-income communities.

Next, I plan to continue teaching dance and collecting used costumes from my students. I will make regular donations to Traveling Tutus, as they will be able to put the costumes to better use than we can.

I would give myself an A, as I am very satisfied with the way the event turned out as well as our yield in costumes. We were focused on our goals, and we pushed through any hardships we faced. I learned a lot about event-planning and the importance of organization. In our final blog post, we included pictures and a video of a few dancers from our event. You can access those here.

Ted Talk Outline:

Describe our idea and why it’s important to give back to this cause.

Talk about our process of planning.

Describe the actual event and how it went.
Our takeaway and what we learned.