Relay for Life - 4/14/10

I have done Relay for Life for a few years now, but this is the first time that I am stepping up and actively participating instead of simply paying a registration fee. I am the team captain, so I will be organizing fundraisers and basically planning the whole event for my church youth group along with my co-captain and friend Denis. This will be a great challenge simply because I have so much going on currently, not because of the rigor of the task. Nevertheless, I am very excited to begin preparing for the event.

Coming into this responsibility, I do have some goals. I hope that I can greater realize the impact of cancer on Cape Cod by fundraising for this event and attending the emotional relay. I want to be able to meet the goal of $1000 to be fundraised, and to be proud of my contribution to research for a cancer cure. I also want to develop leadership skills and become more responsible. I'll know that I have reached these goals simply when I am satisfied with my efforts and truly understand the difference that my relatively small efforts can make on a multitude of suffering people.

Today there was the first captain's meeting for the planning of the event. I went with Denis and our first task was to register the team. We completed the registration of our team under the traditional name for our group, the Soaring Spirits. Together Denis and I then devised a strategy for rounding up all the team members, getting them to register, and encouraging them to fundraise. It should work well because Denis and I are in separate schools, but comprehensively we are able to contact each of the tentative team members. Therefore we delineated the task of contacting each person and exhorting membership.

The rest of the meeting was spent listening to speakers discuss the best ways to prepare for the upcoming relay. We learned creative ways to fundraise, and even received pointers on how to physically train for the walking marathon. A compendium of facts about cancer and its devastating effects was also read to the room, instilling a sense of sadness in the crowd along with the inverse recognition of hope. Perhaps the culmination of our efforts could do something to raise funds and awareness as a means of combating the crippling disease.

Our final course of action was signing up for the Mega Sale, a massive collaborative yard sale in which each of the teams could raise money towards their fundraising goal. Denis and I decided to collect items and bring them to the sale on April 25th as a small but integral beginning to our fundraising endeavor.