Rebooting means we start from the beginning. We have reputation and assets we didn’t have in 2013, but we’re also training a mostly new cadre of volunteers and families.
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Goals
Everything remains free:
We will not charge to attend and do our best to make sure any kid who cannot afford the equipment needed for a project can at least borrow it from us for the meetup at no charge.
12 events in 2023:
1 per month April – August, 2 per month September – November, 1 Hour of Code event in December. This is dependent on getting the facilities and volunteers to do so.
One project per event with age/experience requirements:
We’ll pick a project for each event and that will be the project. It can run anywhere from 90 minutes to 4 hours and will have a hard-requirement for skill level (math, programming, logic, and keyboarding) and a recommended requirement for age.
Sometimes we’ll host one for younger kids with no experience and little to no typing required. Sometimes we’ll host one for high-school age kids with basic OOP skills in Python, JavaScript, or another language. We’ll try to cover a wide range of ages and skill levels over the 12 meetups we hope to hold in 2022.
Proposed Budget & Fundraising Goals
We have two sources of funding, contributions to petty cash and donations to our fiscal sponsor that are earmarked for us.
Petty cash is available immediately for whatever expenses require it but contributions to it are not tax-deductible. Because of the paperwork required, our fiscal sponsor prefers not to accept donations under $25. So if you want to throw $10 our way, you won’t get a write off and it will go to petty cash. If you want to throw $50 our way and you want the tax write-off, we’ll provide instructions on donating it through our fiscal sponsor.
Donations to our fiscal sponsor, Urban Sparks, require us to write a grant proposal which Urban Sparks reviews to ensure the money is being spent on the kids in the way our donors would expect. Then they fund the grant out of those donations.
2023 Proposed Budget: (pending review and approval by our operations committee)
- Insurance: $840
- Volunteer appreciation*: $800
- Marketing **: $600
- Birthday Party ***: $150
* Volunteer appreciation is special SWAG like stickers or shirts that are just given to volunteers, and an annual “volunteer appreciation lunch” to which people who have volunteered 2 or more times prior are invited.
** Marketing represents printing flyers or posters to help advertise upcoming events.
*** Seattle CoderDojo celebrates the 10th anniversary of its first meetup in September. This will cover a minimum level of food, beverages, and utensils for up to 50 people at our September event to be supplemented with a potluck.
Total: $2390
2023 Proposed Fundraiser: $2600 goal to cover expenses and transaction fees. We will not start fundraising until we have scheduled our first event of 2023. We have cash on hand to cover expenses, but we’re hoping to get enough to replenish what we spend and be in a position to budget bigger, dream bigger, and fundraise bigger in 2024.
P.S.: Creating a programmatic “fundraising thermometer” (using HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) to show our progress might also be a cool project for a web development themed meetup or a teen volunteer project.
We have a ton of supplies that were purchased for 2020, so we are depending on that for much of the supplies that will be used at events (markets, badges, stickers, etc.).