Dallas Casino Night Fundraiser: Donate a Buck and Try Your Luck!

Thank you to everyone who attended our Dallas fundraiser! It was a small and rather last-minute affair, but it really just felt like a house party in which people gave us money (the best kind of party!) But what was probably best about it (other than getting to wear a feather boa for our “Casino Night” theme) was that we put together a fundraiser that is very low-cost and easily reproduce-able.

Aditi’s parents magically produced a bunch of gaming equipment from their garage, but if we were to do this particular fundraiser again, we could easily improvise the blackjack table, poker chips and “Jeopardy” board (Ok, so “Jeopardy” isn’t exactly in keeping with our casino theme, but it was a lot of fun.)

I’ll go into some detail here in case anyone who happens across this wants to put together their own fundraiser. We held it in Aditi’s parents’ family room and invited all of Aditi and her sister’s high school friends, family friends, friends of friends and friends of family friends via Facebook, email and a flurry of text messages. All of the family’s old board games and playing cards were pulled out of storage and put to use. A suggested donation of $5 bought you $500 in Monopoly money to play the various games or to buy poker chips. For an additional $1, you could enter our raffle to win a “Race Monologues™” poster and a gorgeous painted scroll Aditi bought in Singapore.

We were lucky in the prizes department—Aditi had lots of inexpensive souvenirs from the places she’d travelled in the last couple years that hadn’t been given away as gifts. I suppose in other circumstances the “prize wall” would also be a great opportunity to “re-gift” or “redistribute” things packed away at the back of your closet. Other than the raffle, we had a prize for a game in which people guessed how many beans were in a jar (although the game was inconveniently located and only one person guessed… so even though Sandip wrote down 500 as his guess and the actual amount was 1004, he was the proud winner of a Thai plate set) and an array of different prizes with various prices people could “buy” with their winnings.

We bought a couple of bottles of cheap red wine, citrus soda and fruit to make sangria, which was much cheaper than buying other alcohol. One bag of popcorn lasted the whole party.

Card games were set up in one half of the room and board games in the other. As guests began arriving, they seemed to naturally distribute themselves among the games. We had the movie 21 playing in the background, and it magically ended just as both of the games of “Outburst” and “Trivial Pursuit” were finishing up, making for the perfect opportunity to pause the party for our little speech. We got everyone’s attention and talked for a few minutes about our project, and then segued into a whole-group game of “Jeopardy”. All the questions were on the subject of race and racism, and we had categories like History, Science and Movies. The game sparks some interesting debates. Afterward, we played another group game, announced our raffle winner, and slowly the party came to an end.

Well, I don’t know how this blog turned into an article on how to throw a cheap fundraiser, but I’ll be blogging again soon about the actual field work we did in Dallas and Miami. I’ll just say now that I’m sorry for bringing New York’s weather with me to Texas and Florida… record lows in both places. I guess I’m taking it home with me though-- Miami is supposed to pop back up into the mid-seventies the day I leave.