Great Stories
Montana Campus Corps:
College Students Meeting Critical Community Needs
Failure and Success by Ashley Widtfeldt

This year I created a project that would teach students the concept of fundraising while introducing them to a local nonprofit and sharing out the organization's fundraising needs. The goal was for students to understand funraising and the organization through an informative session open to all students and then work in teams to develop and implement a fundraising plan.

The turnout for the informative session was dishearteningly low and by the end of the session we only had a team of two students willing to commit to the full semester of planning and implementation. As the semester progressed, it was clear these two students were going to struggle and short of doing things for them nothing I did seemed to help. Within a month one of the students became frustrated and decided she didn't want to be involved.

The one student that was left was a student who had no interest in being there in the first place, but had jumped on board to keep her friend company. She made it clear that she didn't like to go back on her commitments and would stick out the program throughout the semester.

We met weekly to hash out her ideas and when the semester ended and she had reached her monetary goal, she kept going. A month after school ended she had not only tripled the amount of money she had planned to raise, but was volunteering for other aspects of the organization and promoting the organizations mission to any ear willing to listen.She has since inquired about other service opportunities, AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps.

Looking at the goals of this fundraising program when it was created, it was a failure. Looking at this program from the impact of one student who went from a reluctant participant to an enthusiastic and active citizen, this prgram was one of the greatest successes I had all year.

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