Brief Description of the Project

Our project focuses on volunteering and fundraising for the charity Feed My Starving Children in Schaumburg, Illinois. As a team, we decided to organize one primary volunteer session (coordinating our schedules for multiple volunteer sessions was too hard), where our team members and volunteers will participate in hand-packing nutritious meals for children in need. We also decided to include a fundraising component, creating an official donation link through FMSC’s platform and promoting it through social media, personal networks, and flyers.

Brief Description of the Charity

Feed My Starving Children is a Christian Nonprofit that partners with food distribution organizations to provide nutritious meals to children globally. These meals are developed by food science and nutrition professionals. The reason we chose FMSC was because they make it so easy to help. They take donations (or let you create your own donation page through them) and also offer volunteer times for individuals or groups to hand-pack the meals. Many of us take food availability for granted and don’t realize how privileged we really are. Food insecurity is a global issue, and we need to support charities like FMSC that help combat it.

Factual Analysis of Success in Terms of Project Objectives

Overall, I’d say our project was mildly successful. We had set three main success metrics: Funds raised, Meals Packed / Boxes Completed, and Volunteer Participation / Engagement.

For our funds-raised metric, our best-case scenario was raising around $1,000. We actually just exceeded that and reached a total of $1,022 in monetary donations! We received most of our donations from family and friends via social media and word of mouth, with a few donations from random strangers who either saw our flyers or got reached in some other way.

For Volunteer Participation, our best-case scenario was having 22 volunteers (that’s the full reserved space we secured for the packing event), including our project team of 6. Our most likely scenario was 15 volunteers. We fell just short of our most likely scenario and had a total of 14 volunteers. Unfortunately, we had multiple cancellations on the day of the event, but we’re still proud of the turnout since our event was pretty short notice.

Our last success metric was the number of Meals Packed / Boxes Completed. Our best-case scenario was fully packing 25 boxes, and our most likely scenario was fully packing 15. We did end up just meeting our most likely goal of 15 boxes, which is great. Our volunteers were split into two different teams, one completing 8 boxes and the other completing 7. We underestimated how much of our scheduled volunteer time would go to getting set up and assigning roles, but it was overall a good experience.

Two or Three Lessons Learned About Managing Projects

Every project team has probably said this, but hammering out the details early helps a ton. You can figure out the small details after, but it’s super important that the greater details like the type of event, location, date & time, etc. are figured out as soon as possible. Our team found it hard to find a date that worked for everyone that wasn’t too early in the quarter or too late.

Communication is another super important piece of your project. As a team, you all need to be aligned on the duties expected from each of you and the project requirements. Find team members you can trust, set up a group chat early, create an atmosphere of respect, and set ground rules/expectations. Projects like these can be hard and need the participation of every group member to really be successful.

Advice for Future Teams Doing Similar Projects

If you plan on doing a charity like FMSC, try to gather your group and pick an event day as soon as you can. We put it off and ended up with a date that was too soon, and we had to find as many volunteers as quickly as possible. Another piece of advice is to have fun! This can be a great experience if you let it be. Don’t get too stressed out, you’re not doing this alone! Rely on the teammates you picked (not too heavily) and try to have a good time.

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