Planning for a bake sale

Having returned from the Chinese new year break, to find out that the family festival was extremely saddening because it came with the acknowledgement that we had lost a significant opportunity to raise money for our partners, this could have the potential to impact their operations in a small way as they may not get the same amount of yearly donations from our school, while it might not be on a large scale, realising the direct consequences of  COVID-19 on our fundraising abilities were certainly eye-opening at the very least, and it did help put some of the other things like project week cancellation into perspective. A silver lining to this situation was that it prompted us to rethink the direction that our GC’s fundraising was heading towards. We realised that there was an opportunity for us to sell something more wanted in the community than bamboo brushes or wooden sharks, the answer was cookies. Like last time, we conducted surveys, contacted Sodexo and talked to the sustainability student committee and our goal was clear, we wanted to hold a regular bake sale, to fundraise for our GC. This required thinking on multiple fronts: such as coming up with recipes, finding the ingredients for the recipes and actually deciding who would make what. We decided to split these on the basis of our abilities, I took over the task of doing all the finance work with a couple of other members, while other members of the GC decided to brainstorm different recipes for confectionary items that we could sell. It was quite an exciting prospect as it allowed us to work towards achieving something as a GC. This process also helped me realise, however, that ideas may change over time, for example, when we had originally thought of the idea, we had very much envisioned competing against Santai to sell better, more affordable cookies than they were providing students with, but after doing research and talking to Sodexo, the direction we ended up leaning towards was sourcing the goods from Santai and actually selling them for a higher price, to help fundraise, as this would not only reduce the bureaucratic work required for us, it would also make it more realistic for us as we would no longer need to spend time into making cookies the day before and worrying about buying the ingredients.

Link to interview with Sodexo (we weren’t allowed to take video).

UPDATE: Following the closure of school due to circuit breaker measures being implemented, our bake sale initiative has been put on hold, although we as a GC were still very excited about pursuing this idea further once we came back to school, whenever that happens to be. Of course, we didn’t see this coming, but there was this constant realisation in our mind, that due to the nature of getting safety approvals for the food that we wanted to sell, it would make sense that it may take a long time for our bake sale to ever see the light of day, which is why we had also worked with grade 10 students from our GC to make sure that they knew about the project in case they wanted to continue it after we had left the GC in grade 12.

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