Third Time's the Charm

I've tried to blog twice before in the past, but I never survived beyond the first handful of posts. My first attempt was to chronicle my efforts at building a freelance writing career, and the next try was more of a "mommy blog," but writing for a living kind of drains me of the desire to write for pleasure. Sadly, most of my jobs have dried up along with the economy, so that's no longer an issue. Plus, this time, I have renewed purpose. I've become so bogged down in volunteer efforts that I really need to quantify my efforts so I can either streamline some things or back off others entirely. I'm tired!

Here's a little background. Three of my four kids go to the parochial school that I attended as a child. The Catholic school system nationwide has suffered some serious blows over recent years, not the least of which is our pathetic economy. So like many Catholic schools, our tuition is climbing while enrollment is shrinking, one feeds the other, and it's become a vicious negative cycle. Struggling families, my own included, are having a hard time paying for Catholic education. Couple that with a pastor who alienated many parishioners and school families who ultimately decided it wasn't worthwhile to stick it out, and we're facing real crisis in the near future. We currently have less than half of the student population that we had six years ago.

Enter the Fundraising Committee, which I joined at its inception two years ago. Our initial goal was to present some sort of money-raising opportunity every month, whether a big social event or something smaller, like a sale of some kind. My main part in all of this was co-chairing a spring Ladies' Night Out, an event that my co-chair and I created from scratch. We now have two of them under our belts, and showed positive growth in both attendance and profits after the second year. However, it's a HUGE undertaking, and I'm still recovering. My intention had been to track the time we put in so we could actually see how much our profits would pay out in actual labor hours. But I never got around to actually logging the time, and now I have to go back and try to estimate so I can fill out a report for the committee. Hopefully, this blog will take care of that for me in the future, assuming I can stick to it this time!