Latest and Greatest

 So what's new? Well, things are going well. I was the guest speaker at the Franklin Rotary Club tonight. The Club has been making an annual donation of $250 for the past few years and they always invite me to come back and speak. They are always very responsive and I really enjoy speaking with them. It is a great group of people. I felt like the speech went great- I was really on my point and felt energetic. When you speak, you also draw energy from the room and I was really feeling the positive energy. I was a little stressed when I was driving over to the restaurant, because I hadn't had any time today to work on my speech. The good thing is that I've spoken about Project Smile so many times and the mission is so close to my heart, it feels very natural to get up and speak. However, some speeches go better than others. I'm glad that this one went well. I gave each of the members a Project Smile calendar which got a very positive response.

Things are chugging along with auction items for both of our big events. We already have a couple of items donated for both events and we're getting a fair amount of rejections as expected. That is disappointing of course, but it's the nature of the hunt. The good news is that Jet Blue is donating airline tickets again which is awesome and a huge item! Sponsor hunt is also in full swing on both events. I've reached out to a bunch of new potential sponsors and we're in the early stages of developing some new partnerships and I'm waiting to hear back from other potential sponsors. I'm going to a networking event in Boston next week and should be able to make some new connections there, hopefully.

Tomorrow is going to be a busy day. I'm doing donations in Fitchburg and Leominster at noon, then zooming down to Worcester for a donation to the Dept. of Children and Families. We're donating the usual supply of stuffed animals, books and coloring books/crayons to DCF, but we're also adding a lot of extra crayons. A group of girl scouts from Quincy dropped off a large donation last week which included a lot of large boxes of crayons, so we're donating 60 boxes of crayons. DCF puts together Easter baskets for children and they need items for the baskets, so these donations will be used in those baskets. We also have some really beautiful books, so I'm including those in there along with 60 coloring books. We did a special donation a couple of years ago to Worcester for their Easter baskets, so I'm happy that we can help again. When we do our usual donations to DCF, they send the donations out to the different offices across the state.

Next week, we're donating again to Lowell PD and Bridgewater PD. I had to reschedule Bridgewater- we were supposed to donate there a few weeks ago, but the blizzard interrupted that.

Well, that's the latest for tonight. I'm pretty tired now, but I want to get my donations boxes ready to be loaded in the car for tomorrow. I'm not a morning person, so it always is more helpful to get everything ready the night before so I don't have to fuss around with getting donations together in the morning. Then I'm off to eat my grapefruit! Until next time friends...