Lots of Spots for Little Tots!

Hi Everyone!

What a busy week!  As always, I have put in quite a few service hours both for St. Jude and Letters from Home!  The first event I had this week was on Thursday.  Thursday, I worked with College Mentors for Kids.  The kids were learning about what it means to volunteer (sounds familiar?).  I talked with them about what Letters from Home did and why they did it.  There were 8 kids and 10 mentors.  The kids put together three packages full of snacks and hygiene products and small gifts!  They are really great packages!  They also colored pictures of turkeys and wrote little messages on the bottom!  They really seemed to enjoy the coloring and really were quite entranced by all of the candy and snacks the troops were getting.  A package of gum and a small tin of Altoids went missing from a box and I’m pretty sure they just couldn’t help it :).  These are Thanksgiving packages.  Normally, the club doesn’t send out Thanksgiving packages, we just jump into Christmas.  Given the opportunity to teach these kids and offer publicity for the organization, we graciously agreed to send a few packages.  The packages will be mailed on Monday or Tuesday.  It’s unfortunate that the packages will be late. :/  I will just mail the Christmas ones out super early to make up for it! :)

For St. Jude this weekend, I organized and participated in Spots for Tots.  By organized, I mean I took my best guess at what should be going on!  Thankfully it wasn’t too hard and it was a success!  As my previous posts said, I was supposed to go to a St. Jude Walk and volunteer in Carmel.  Not many people were signed up to partake in Spots for Tots though, this is the last game, and this is a real money maker!  All the money made from selling parking spots in our parking lot goes to St. Jude!  The best thing is that this only cost 50 cents for a piece of poster board!  We made a ton of money for St. Jude!  I was upset about having to miss the walk, but my responsibilities as philanthropy chair to my house outranked my want to go help in other ways.  In an ideal world, I would have gone to both with plenty of time leftover for other things!  I’ll just write it down for next year and work extra hard then! 

The next event I’ll be organizing is Sleigh Bell Days!  This is not so much philanthropy as it is community service!  We invite children from the Lafayette/West Lafayette area over to Tridelta for a Christmas Party!! This was a lot of fun last year and I cannot wait to put the finishing touches on all of the plans!  This will definitely be a project for me to complete over Thanksgiving break and the beginning of that week! We are planning to do it during dead week! I can’t wait!  

For the Kids,

Shannon

Pancakes, Syrup, and Orange Juice! Oh My!

Hey Everyone!

Wow! This week was so busy!  The first thing was a Letters from Home meeting.  The meeting went well, but the attendance was lower than normal.  We made Thanksgiving and Christmas cards.  This Thursday I was invited by College Mentors for Kids to do a small program.  It will be about 30-45 minutes of presentation and doing putting together packages.  I am going to have all the materials put together and the children will just have to put these things in the box and color a turkey or two!  There will be 15 kids, and five children per box.  I will then mail the packages this weekend, or the beginning of next week.  I hadn’t originally planned on doing any Thanksgiving packages, but given the circumstances, I felt this was a very good way to promote the club and also give the club positive publicity!  I will be going shopping on Wednesday and putting the materials together!  I am hoping I can talk for 30 minutes!

This Saturday is the St. Jude walk in Carmel, IN!  I am very excited to participate! I am unsure what I will be doing, but it will most likely be anything they need help with.  I am going with five other sisters!  We are going to spend some quality sister time and also help St. Jude!  I am really excited to spend time with them and to help St. Jude!  It’s bound to be really fun and rewarding.

Lastly, today was a very important day for me!  Today was FlapJack Attack!  We raised a lot of money and we had a ton of fun!  I earned 6 service hours today!  There was a comedy club that came, games like orange juice flippy cup, and maple syrup chug!  There were also representatives from different organizations like Southern Tide.  They gave out koozies and key chains and really helped support our cause!  There was a consistent flow of people always coming in through the door!  There were so many people; keeping up with pancake making was even difficult for three kitchens!  We made it through though!  The reason today was so special to me, is because today is the day I officially became philanthropy chair!  I received my binder and an official lists of to-do’s!  I am so very excited to begin planning future philanthropy events and to raise money for St. Jude!!  I’m so excited to be there for the kids!

Shannon

Losing Hair because of Kiwi

Hi Everyone!

This past week I completed my first service hours as philanthropy chair!  It was a small presentation given to a group of third graders!  The program was college mentors for kids and was to be about diversity.  The idea was to show the students that the patients are the same as them, just sick.  The students came to Tridelta, ate a snack, made door hangers for the kids at St. Jude, and then came over to listen to me talk about St. Jude and show them a video clip!  It was a lot of fun, but I was very nervous!  I asked if they knew what cancer was and the responses were hilarious! One boy said it was when you had to shave your head, one said when you lost all your hair, and finally one said it’s when you are sick!  I then played the video.  The students were in love with the little boy Caleb in the video.  After the video played, I asked what they wanted to be.  There were lots of professional ball players and teachers.  The video talked about Chemo, but the students called it Kiwi.  It took me a few minutes to figure out what they were talking about.  They children were very excited to learn about St. Jude!  They continued to ask questions and I continued to answer in the best, most simplistic way I knew how!  It’s very hard to answer “Why do people get Cancer,” especially without using the word genetics.

                My next service hours will be this Thursday and this Sunday!  Letters from Home will have a meeting this week from 6:30-7:30 in BRNG 1230!  We will be starting on Christmas Cards and packages!  I plan on doing 25 packages!  Each package will have Christmas gifts—Books and movies, hygiene products, Christmas Candy and Christmas snacks, and several other little gifts.  All these items will be wrapped with several Christmas cards and letters.  Christmas is my favorite time to send out packages because it is the time I feel when most military personnel miss their families the most.  I will be going shopping for cardstock paper, stickers, ribbons, etc. before the meeting this Thursday.

                Also, this Sunday is FlapJack Attack, the planning is well underway and the event will be successful!  I was going to sign-up for several different committees for flapjack to be very busy and be an active member.  Instead, I will be following around the current philanthropy chair and learning how she manages the events, etc.  I think this will be very beneficial to my training and cannot wait to get another prospective on philanthropy events!  I will be able to learn a lot and after this event, I will be on my own with planning the events for the rest of the year! I am very excited but nervous at the same time!

I have attached the video link in case anyone is interested in watching little Caleb or the other patients' ideas for when they grow up!

For the Kids,

Shannon Morton

Drumroll Please...

Hi Everyone,

I’m very excited to inform you that I have become the philanthropy chair for my house!  I am very excited to step into this position as I am truly passionate about both my house and St. Jude.  I am also very nervous as the previous philanthropy chair was an outstanding person and I’m sure that she is the best person for the job!  I really hope that with her training I can do half the job that she did!  It will be a lot of work, but I am truly dedicated to the cause and I know that no matter what, my love for St. Jude will help me through it!  I have pictures of St. Jude patients all over my walls.  These little ones truly inspire me to get through my studies so I can help them when I’m older, but temporarily I will love to help them by being philanthropy chair. 

The first thing I will do is speak to kiddos tomorrow from College Mentors for Kids.  The theme is diversity and I will be speaking to them how the patients at St. Jude are like them and unlike them.  I am really nervous!  I will be speaking to fourth graders, but I will be doing this without any supervision from the previous philanthropy chair!  After this, the next event will be on November 12 from 11-2pm.  This is FlapJack Attack, our national philanthropy!  It’s a pancake breakfast/brunch!  There are games and prizes and of course unlimited breakfast food!  I am sure that it will be a success.  This has been planned and will be the former philanthropy chair’s event, but I will be assisting her in her job to get the feel for the events!  I am not nervous about this at all!  I know that as long as I have the support from her and from my sisters, that everything will be wonderful! I am so excited to accept this position and I cannot wait to begin!

For the Kids,

Shannon