The plans for the climbing camp are in full stride now. We have dates, gear and materials commitment, instructor commitment (including a yoga instructor!) and the girls are currently making the calls to get all the participants signed on. As of now, if the participants just show up we'll have a kick ass camp.
The only holes we have at the moment are non-necessary ones: i.e., tee-shirts, participant certificates, prizes, etc. Plans are in the works to get these, but we can't pay for them via fundraiser like I originally envisioned. Why? The city of Zhytomyr wouldn't give us permission to do a car wash, and most other ideas for fundraisers weren't really viable.
We were looking at local sponsorship on the certificates and tee-shirts, but still didn't have a lot of leads on prizes. And we want quite a few: the participants will be in teams and the teams will earn points for winning climbing skills competitions, winning team games (ropes course-style challenges) and getting high scores on healthy lifestyle quizes. At mimimum we'd want to award the overall team, but it'd be cool to give out smaller prizes for each competition.
Then a very simply idea came to me last week and I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier: email climbing companies for their promotional items to give out as prizes. I went through an issue of Rock and Ice and wrote down the name of every advertiser in the magazine and yesterday sent out about 25 emails, less than half the list (with a slow internet connection, finding their websites and then finding their contact info was a time consuming process).
But less than 24 hours later, I got four responses:
*Trango said they had already spent their promotional budget for the year, but to keep them in mind next year (we will).
*Metolius is sending us stickers!
*Rock and Ice is sending, get this: a 2 year-subscription to the magazine, back issues, several copies of "How to Climb" and stickers! Boo yeah!
*And Rock Empire (I own a set of Rock Empire cams) sent me the email of their Europe branch and said that if they weren't interested, to email them back and then gave me a personal email address. Boo yeah again!
Possibly I'll keep getting "no"s, but already we're going to have a decent amount of swag to give out as prizes and I get the feeling we'll get more!
It's all about knowing how to beg.