Penny by penny

Recent fundraisers produced by Baldwin4Children.org are chipping away at a goal of $321,000 to restore art, music and sports programs that were cut from this year’s Baldwin school budget. A groundswell of enthusiasm for these efforts has resulted in dozens of fundraisers for the 2013-14 school year. But where does the effort stand? And what will the elevated profile of Baldwin’s school funding situation mean in 2014-15?

Fundraising
Baldwin4Children.org, known as B4C, is a nonprofit group led by Baldwin parents Jen Clavin and Richard Damm. To make its goals more manageable, the group divided the overall goal of raising $321,000 into four deadlines: August, September, October and February.

To meet those deadlines, B4C strung together an impressive grass-roots fundraising effort, combining old-school flea markets and car washes with new media tools like Razoo and Facebook to cultivate support. The results to date have been mixed: The group has raised enough money to reinstate some extracurricular programs, but not all of them.

By the August deadline, enough funds had been raised to cover fall sports at the high school. But there was not enough money to pay for that season’s sports at the middle school.

In an email to Baldwin4Children supporters, Clavin wrote, “We were heartbroken to not have the money to give to restore both programs. Because we did not meet this goal, there will be no football, girls’ soccer, boys’ soccer, boys’ tennis or field hockey this fall at the [middle school]. But we plan to raise enough to cover all the rest of the programs.”