After years of driving by and seeing the “needs” list on their business sign, my partner and I decided to try and raise money for our local animal shelter. We already recycled at home, collected trash and recycling from our neighborhood streets (picked up litter), and had started a recycling program at our jobs.
Therefore, we already had a good foundation for this fundraiser. We also had a local recycling company that paid cash for aluminum cans, so it seemed like a slam dunk idea.
For two months, we collected all the cans we could. We walked the streets of our town, sent emails to our friends and family, sent out an email to our co-workers, and bugged our neighbors. We asked everyone to save their aluminum cans for us for two months to help the animals (giving them statistics on shelter animals etc.)
At the end of those two months, we asked that they either bring the cans to us at our home or at work, or contacted us to arrange us to come and pick them up ourselves. The response to this fundraiser was amazing!
After two months of collecting, we had over 100 pounds of aluminum to sell to the recycling company. We were not only amazed by how much people saved but by how much we were able to collect just off our city streets! Everyone was excited to see how much money we raised for the animals. We took our cans to the recycling center, they weighed the cans, and they gave us cash.
We had 113 pounds of cans and netted nearly $85.00 for the shelter (current price was 75 cents per pound that day). My partner and I added $15.00 of our own money and made the donation an even $100.00 to the shelter.
This fundraiser went so well, that we are thinking of making it a monthly thing forever. It is amazing what a little bit of recycling can do for a charity!
They were so happy when we gave them the check for $100.00. It may not seem like much money, but it sure helped those animals and made a lot of people feel good.
