This past weekend, Pack 464 conducted a fund-raising event during Art in The Park, alongside our troop. They were selling Trail’s End popcorn to the masses. Scott, a Den Leader with the pack setup a booth near one of the entrance venues to the park and caught visitors as they entered or left the venue.
Fund-raisers are a great way for the pack, or troop for that matter, to earn money to support its activities while teaching valuable lessons at the same time.
Popcorn, for instance is a little on the expensive side, compared with buying a bag at the grocery store, so a scout needs to be persuasive in trying to sell it. Part of this process is learning to overcome objections, which may lead to rejection. You don’t need to learn to be a salesman, but persuasion skills are important for almost every job out there.
Along with selling comes rejection. The little ones are going to face rejection and this is a good place to start seeing that get some practice on how to handle rejection. It is hard to handle rejection for most people and it can be bad for the young to go through this experience, but learning to realize that getting upset about it doesn’t change anything.
This is where perseverance comes in. If someone doesn’t buy it the next one will. Be tenacious now and it will come in handy to get you through big school projects and big work projects later in life.
Another great thing about fund-raisers is that you get to work on your math skills, such as adding up order totals and making change. You can even get into calculating how much needs to be sold to make your fundraising goals or figuring out the rate of sale on an hourly basis.
Fund raising allows scouts to learn some great life skills while simultaneously building the funds to do many of the things the scouts crave to do.
As Always,
Be Prepared or as the Cubs say: “Do Your Best!”,
