Fall 2016 Newsletter

Dear FEARless friends and family,

As 2016 comes to an end and we look toward 2017, the Board of FEARless would like to take some time to share with you our accomplishments and activities of the year. This past Fall was one of our most successful fundraising and advocacy semesters yet! We are proud to announce that our expenses were less than 13% of our total revenue for the time frame and variety of fundraising activities.

We began the semester strong with the challenge of presenting a Homecoming candidate and campaign, our own Director of External Affairs Katie Talley. The candidates on Virginia Tech’s Homecoming Board comprised of 16 Hokies who believed the importance of Homecoming exceeded a popularity contest. Each student ran on a platform that was meant to improve the lives of others or give back to the local Blacksburg community. Our campaign centered around Breaking Gender Stereotypes by Inventing the Future. The experience was an expansion in scale for us, in that we spent countless hours campaigning outside academic buildings, ordering a variety of purple stickers, banners, and pencils, and of course supporting Katie to the fullest extent in any way possible. As a part of her campaign, Katie spotlighted members of the Virginia Tech and Blacksburg community that we believed were helping to break gender stereotypes, including a female business owner, a male cheerleader and nursing student, and a male artist. Check out the spotlights here: https://www.facebook.com/KT4Queen/?fref=ts

After the rush of Homecoming, we spent the rest of the semester running bake sales, dorm storms, and a full week of creating and delivering finals survival kits to help diminish the stress of exams. These fundraisers not only provided us a means to spread the word about the importance of global education equality, but also allowed us to raise enough to support one of our partners Camfed (camfed.org), in their campaign to provide tertiary education to 10 women in rural Zimbabwe. We are so proud to say we have funded two of these students’ education and with incoming donations and the beginning of the next semester, expect to be able to fund at least 30% of the entire campaign. Learn more about the campaign and consider donating at: https://camfed.org/donate/appeals/zimbabwe-send-10-young-women-college/

Top: A financial report for the FEARless activities of the Fall semester. Our goal with every fundraiser is to minimize expenses in order to maximize the amount that can go toward funding programs

Bottom: A sample of our Homecoming campaign materials used on social media