Courtney Pisano came up with a great fundraising idea – creating a giant sticky note mosaic at a local mall – to raise funds for her own non-profit organization called Children’s Lasting Power.
Courtney, 16, is a rising junior at Enloe High School in Raleigh, NC. The money raised will be donated to the Methodist Home for Children in Raleigh and the Masonic Home for Children at Oxford, NC.
She found out there was a world record for creating Post-it note mosaics and she instantly knew it was the perfect match for her fundraising efforts.
“I wanted something no one had really done before,” Courtney said. “And I wanted something where a lot of people could come together and help.”
The giant mosaic created in the main hallway at Triangle Town Center Mall needed 44,000 sticky notes and took a volunteer crew almost eight hours to complete.
Courtney raised $5,000 from corporate sponsors and from mall shoppers who donated $1 to sponsor a sticky note in the world record mosaic.
Courtney enlisted the help of volunteers to carefully place the colored squares in patterns.
“She comes up with good ideas, but I’ve never heard of anything like this before,” said Galen Pischke, a volunteer who spent six hours on the floor sticking down the squares.
“I’m taken by her creativity and enthusiasm, and I wanted to be a part of it,” said Carroll Cope, another volunteer, as she placed dozens of blue sticky notes into a row. “It’s admirable, and she is laying the groundwork for other people to think outside the box with fundraising.”
“Whether we break a record or not, raising money is a great thing,” said Leigh Pisano, Courtney’s mother.
The mosaic project is the largest fundraiser so far for Children’s Lasting Power, but Courtney doesn’t intend for it to be the last.
She’s already thinking ahead to next year when she is going to partner with another organization to try to raise $11,000 to build a kitchen for a school in Malawi.
Gotta love how she came up with an awesome fundraising idea linking a world record attempt with raising funds for orphaned children.
Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/2012/08/21/2280713/outside-the-box-fundraising.html