The past three weeks have been filled with many stressful, challenging yet amazing and grateful moments. Melanie and I have seen a lot of progress in each one of our projects which has made us extremely happy. Regarding the yearbook we spent a lot of time advertising for the ads. We sent emails to many companies, restaurants and stores in our community that might be interested in buying a space in our yearbook where they will have the opportunity to advertise their company. The challenging part of this process was the fact that we had anxiously wait for them to respond and a lot of them because they weren’t interested. However, we did get enough responds from the ones that were interested and from these we ended up making around $1000. Now we are just waiting on the companies to send us their ads in order for us to put them in our yearbook and at the same time send back the payment information. This is something we are still figuring out with Karina which is in charge of all the accounts and money of the school. From this we can say that the ads were a success and this money along with the one that we fundraised last trimester from the Dodgeball tournament, are going to help us pay for the inscription, the printing of them, hopefully lowering the price of the yearbook and lastly paying for the scholarship students that aren’t capable of buying it. When it comes to the actual creation of the yearbook I will say that we have made a lot of progress in comparison to the first half of the trimester. We got the committee members to start adding photos to the pages they were assigned. After the picture day, Melanie and I helped Genna with the retake picture day in order to make sure that each student and teacher got their portrait taken. We are only missing the school photo which we weren’t able to do that day due to the strong winds but the school established a new day with Genna to take it. Lastly for the portraits, we got Genna to send them to us which we are really grateful for. The only problem is that we have been struggling in downloading them to our computers in order to transfer them into Pictavo. This obstacle has definitely put our patience and technological skills to a test but we have and are still trying our best to solve this problem. This week we asked profe Carlos the tech teacher to help us and he has been really kind and helpful through this process. Another task we still have to do is teach and get everything reader for the seniors to have their own Pictavo account in order for them to start making their senior special page which they have been really excited for. We hope to do this before the end of this trimester but if we don’t find a time to do this, we will be communicating with them during spring break to make sure they understand how to use this program. Overall, we feel that we are in a good place with our yearbook and now we have to focus mainly on getting all of our page done before the start of the next trimester. Now these past 3 weeks have been really crucial and important for our Boston exchange Project. We started off with not a lot of improvement or progress. But then once we decided to create an Indiegogo Campaign for people to go and donate to this amazing project, that’s when everything changed. First of all I want to acknowledge Melanie’s hard work and effort on setting up this campaign because without her it wouldn’t be where it is at this point. Even though I did help her on many aspects, she did the majority of the hard work, trying really hard to figure out what Indiegogo was asking us to do and even letting some tears out as even with my help, we weren’t able to figure it out. However, after researching and trying and trying, we were able to launch it! Once we got it to work, the propaganda and sharing time started. We shared it with our families, friends, parents, teachers and students. We shared it on all social media platforms as a way to have many people read and learn about our project. At first we were really excited and motivated but nothing was happening even thought we were sharing it with everyone we knew. To be honest, at first I didn’t have a lot of faith in this campaign as I was told from Willa and Mileidy that this method didn’t really work for them. This completely changed when we got the first donation. While in school we got the notification that we had just received $100. After this everything changed. The next few weeks we got two other donations and after we left this to the side for a while to see if we would get more donations. However it was not until last week that we got most of the donations. During this time we decided to finally meet with Willa, Mileidy and Abby to introduce ourselves and show her our progress and prove to her that we are going to work very hard to accomplish our goal. She loved what we had done so far and we really enjoyed meeting her and seeing how lovely and charming she is with whoever she has a connection with. Once we shared our campaign with her she was very helpful and kind as she also shared it with her friends from Boston and Cepia. Once she did this, is when we started getting more and more donations. We are currently at $1680 which is 48% of our goal ($3,500). Melanie and I are extremely grateful with each and everyone one of the donors and will appreciate their help for the rest of our lives. This has motivated us even more and we are thrilled to continue to achieve our goal and have this project become a reality once again. We are well aware that this is just the beginning. This Thursday we will be having another meeting with Abby, Willa, Mileidy and the two girls from Cepia that went on this trip last year, as a way to learn more about the outcomes and what we can change for this year. We look forward to this day and are extremely excited to continue meeting everyone that will be part of this life-changing experience. During this break, Melanie and I will be planning out our next event to hopefully fundraise the rest of the money needed. We will be planning a bingo for parents and teachers from our school in order to create a fun event specially for them. We have a lot to do regarding both of our CAS projects this spring break, but we know that as we strive every day to achieve our goals, we will be able to complete these projects that will have a beautiful outcome not just for our community but also for ourselves.
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