When we started this adoption adventure, one of the things that we were (and are) the most anxious about was how we were going to be able to afford to bring our child home. Our particular agency/country costs about $30,000, which includes our home study fee, our follow up home visits after our child is home (visits at 3, 6, and 12 months, and then 2 and 5 years) dossier prep, translation, binding, matching process, and our two week trip to China. That number was (is!) incredibly daunting because, like most of you, we don’t just have $30,000 burning a hole in our pockets. We have been able to pay for our home study, follow up visits (have to be paid up front), and our first agency fee and our Immigration fees on our own. The rest of the $30,000, we are hoping to raise through grants and fundraising, which is where you guys come in.
Right now, we are planning three fundraisers. The first is a t-shirt sale through a company called Chrome Buffalo. They will give us 50% of the cost of the shirts, so we’ll make $11 from each shirt sold. That fundraiser will start on the 1st of October. I tried to pick a shirt that a lot of people would like. This is a great option for people who are out of town and might want to help but probably don’t want to drive to the local events. Buy shirts for your whole family, so you can be matchy-matchy. 🙂
The next fundraiser will be an event at our church, either a breakfast or dinner, donation event. We don’t have a date for that one yet, but I’ll update when we have a confirmed date. This would be perfect for our local peeps!
The last one won’t be until next Spring/Summer, and will be an adoption garage sale. So if you have things in your house that you’ve been dying to get rid of, but the idea of having a garage sale yourself is just too much, you can pass them on to us and we’ll put them in our garage sale and sell them to help bring P4 home! We’re hoping for a lot of items and will make arrangements to come and get things from you as the time gets closer, but I wanted to put that out there so you might be thinking about items you might like to let us sell.
Other ways you can help: Please spread the word about our adoption process, this blog and our fundraisers! The more people who know our story, the better! Would your church or organization be willing to host a fundraiser for us? We can provide the labor if needed! Do you know of any other fundraising avenues that we haven’t mentioned? Please share them with me! And finally, if you’d like to help us, but would rather do it directly, we stuck a PayPal donate button over there on the side, even though it makes me squirmy.
To be honest, this is a really uncomfortable post for me to write. I don’t like asking for help, and I especially don’t like asking for financial help. But we are blessed beyond words by an amazing community of people who love and support us, so I’m sucking it up, and putting these words out there. Friends, we would be truly humbled and grateful beyond what I can adequately express in words if you wanted to help us bring P4 home. At the same time, we understand that not everyone is in a position to help financially, and we want you know that, even though this particular post has been money focused, your emotional support, interest, enthusiasm and genuine caring has meant so much to us and that is, sincerely, just as important to us as your financial support. So, okay… that’s the deal. We’ll keep you updated as things progress. I hope my next post is going to be way less serious!