HELP WANTED

Planning for the new fall fundraiser is well underway. Some highlights of this event:

Event naming contest (winning class gets breakfast!), Walk of Shoes, Challenge board, Wendy's Night Go Healthy Challenge, all-school kick-off assembly, and spirit week. Please go to the blog at www.armatagefunwalk.blogspot.com for more details on this great event.

Through catalogue sales, students and families have typically raised $16,000 for our school. This money has supported ongoing school events, provided books and equipment for classrooms, paid for buses for field trips and Art Adventure and has helped meet the cost of specialists (such as for reading and math). Here's the catch: in order for Armatage to have received $16,000, our kids actually had to sell $32,000 worth of product. That's a lot of wrapping paper!

Wouldn't it be nice to see all that money go to Armatage instead? Eventually, we hope it will. For this first year with the revolutionary new event, we're setting our Grand Goal at $16,000. And if we meet that goal, Joan Franks has agreed to accept a special challenge! (More on that later!)

What we need NOW are people who can spend two weeks or so contacting potential corporate sponsors. Here's our hit list:


REI

Dick’s (Toni Locke)

Whole Foods

Target

General Mills (Nancy Luna)

Yoplait

Super Value

Land O’Lakes

Kemps

3M

Polaris

Cargill

Best Buy

Park Nicollet

Medtronic

Blue Cross

Health Partners

Fairview

St. Jude Medical

United Health

Children’s Hospital

Heart Association

American Diabetes Association

Dairy Council

Third Lair Demo

Radio Disney

Eric’s Bikes

Penn Cycle

Hoigaard’s

Nike

We plan to approach neighborhood businesses as well and will announce that list early next week. What we're looking for is money for our school, of course. But this event is not just a fundraiser. It's also a chance to teach our children and our community about good health and habits that can last a lifetime. If you work at any of these companies -- or one we might have missed -- and would be interested in helping us to request either money for our school or contributions of gross quantities of items that are health or fitness related (pedometers, first aid kits, water bottles, etc.) that we can use as prizes or give-aways at the event, please contact Tina Erazmus at mrsraz1999@yahoo.com or Dawn Lemke at dawnjosephsarah@comcast.net. We would love to have any of the above companies set up an information table at the event as well.

If you don't have the time to make calls, but can put us in touch with the right person, that would be a great help. If you don't know anyone personally but are willing to make some calls, that's a great help too. Our goal is to raise not just money, but awareness too, build community and have a great time! WE NEED YOUR HELP to get there!

Thank you for your time and attention,

Fun Walk Committee: Chris Blumenfeld, Nan Carlson, Christin Crabtree, Tina Erazmus, Pam McCarthy-Kern, Dawn Lemke, Nikki Lindberg, Toni Locke, Daena Stearns...YOU?