Wednesday 23 March 2011

Raise the Bar for Japan

I get so frustrated because I fall behind on this so ridiculously quickly because time on machon passes so unbelievably fast. I can't believe I’ve already missed almost two weeks but because I want to write about today and recent events I’m going to do that and later backtrack to the last two weeks.

Like I said before, each person on machon has to take part in a meoravut afternoon and I chose social activism. The different options involve a range of things from volunteering to visit and spend time with old people to travelling around Jerusalem or learning more ivrit. After a few frustrating futile sessions of attempting to do something about the abundant food waste at machon, we moved onto a more present topic. During our meeting last Wednesday we decided that as a social activism group we really should do something to help provide relief for Japan. Someone suggested a bar night and within quite literally hours solid plans were in place. We spent a few hours discussing the viability of the plan, numbers, what we wanted to achieve etc. then we went out and did it. After previously calling and making a few plans, myself and two others along with Nic Schlagmann our co-ordinator went around town speaking to bar owners and trying to find an appropriate location. After many, not so appropriate, if extremely bizarre places, we found a pretty perfect one on shammai street called Canaan. The manager agreed to let us rent it out for free, charge and entrance 'donation' and even name a specific drink of which half the proceeds went to Japan.

The second, parallel part of our plan was to team up with nu http://www.nucampaign.org/collections/t-shirts . They make these amazing t-shirts for different causes and agreed to dedicate three of their t-shirts (pink parachutes, declaration of independence and israeli pioneers)which didn't have specific causes to helping provide aid for Japan. You can look them up but each of the t-shirts has a specific story or stories behind it which is printed on the inside of the shirt. Obviously some of the money has to go to production but they generously agreed to give half of all the 60 shek t-shirts we sold to Japan via Isra-aid. We arranged for them to come in and explain about and sell the t-shirts in the lunch break where we managed to sell 35 which is pretty impressive for a bunch of machonniks on shnat budgets. Although we were charging a 15 shek entry fee we marketed that if you were wearing the t-shirt you got in for free. We sold a further 7 t-shirts in the early hours of the event this evening. We also had all of netzer spend about an hour making friendship bracelets with red and white string during out closed weekend which we sold for 5 shek each.

The event came off pretty well, I think we probably reached around 100 people (the unfortunate after effects of a long weekend of Purim celebrations) and made well over 2000 shekels. This was only supposed to be our mini project so we most likely have a fair amount of feed-back and analysis to do before our big event planning.

If someone scans it in I want to later add in the poster design we used for advertising.

That's all for now, I just got back from the bar so am more than ready for bed, night all and much excited for the family visit next week :)

S x  

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