Host an evening of care!
What is an evening of Care? Typically these events involve a group of families and friends who gather to serve a cause and have fun. They can also be held during the day as a lunch or breakfast meeting and be called a Day of Care or “Helpy Hour” too! Think of it as a party with a positive social impact!
You can organize a day or evening of caring to make a difference and deepen the connections you have within your family, workplace and/or community by organizing a Day or Evening of Caring event!
A small community hosted an Evening of Care this past year with the intention of honoring an incredibly special person whom they care for deeply. They had fun and by following the eight steps outlined below, they collected and assembled 54 Swag Bags for CHOP! Read on… you can do this too!
Step 1 Determine who will be involved. Family, friends, community associations, teams and work groups are among the most common participants in these events. However any group motivated by a cause and willing to gather can work well.
Step 2 Ask the community first. Provide background information to your group, educate them about the community’s connection to your cause.
Step 3 Describe the needs and the goals. Take time to confirm the needs of the organization, family or person in need. Once you feel you have accurately assessed the need, determine what your think your team can contribute and make sure everyone knows what the goal is!
Step 4 Plan out the logistics. Write out how you will set up your event. What items will you collect? Will there be food and refreshments? Who will prepare the food? What will your venue be? Do you want to involve children? If necessary how will you organize and assemble any donations or gifts you might be collecting?
Step 5 Determine the division of labor. This is a great place to leverage technology. There are free services like Signup Genius that can help you track RSVPs and attendees’ commitments in the effort to support your cause. You may need to key in all the items needed to help friends who are interested easily assess what they can bring. You may benefit from proactively making suggestions that will help your team divide up the quantities of items needed to help ensure you do not have too many duplicates of any one item.
Step 6 Provide some friendly reminders. At the very least send an email reminder to people who volunteered to attend 4-5 days before your event. Include details regarding what they committed to bring to the event.
Step 7 Take time to plan out a coordinated assembly line if you are collecting items that consist of multiple components. Brace yourself for a whirlwind of activity but be sure to make the conscious effort to have fun. Think through how they will be collected, assembled and/or packaged.
Step 8 Plan for how you will deliver your donations.
This same process can be applied to support many other causes too…!
Helpful hints…
Have a plan when talking to people about the project. Have three bullets ready to help get your point across to volunteers and friends.
Allow 1-3 days before scheduled delivery date to allow time to double-check and ensure that each bag is complete.
“We rallied together as a community to honor our friends and assembled over 50 Swag Bags for children undergoing chemotherapy treatment at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.” -Kristen, LIV Foundation Volunteer
Want to learn more about how you can help The LIV Foundation? Call us at 484-808-5481, email us at thelivfoundation@gmail.com, or visit us online at www.thelivfoundation.org and follow us on Facebook!
If you would like to support us, consider running an evening of care and help us fulfill some Swag Bags for chemotherapy patients at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. For an outline of the contents of the swag bags and how they benefit families in need check out our recent blog post What We Do…!
If you commit to the effort, collect and assemble the contents while having some fun with friends, we will help you! We’ll even pick them up and deliver them for you!
LIV Foundation Blog 