Greetings!
We are the girls of Class 4 at The Wilberforce School in Princeton, NJ. We want to share with you something exciting we are working on for our third trimester project. Our school is named after a man named William Wilberforce who combined his Christian faith with his academic and leadership abilities in order to see the slave trade abolished in the British empire. Each year one of our projects involves either active service to others (those in need) or helping the created order (the environment) of which we are called to be stewards. We are excited to share with you our project for the spring and ask you to be a part of it. We are pretty excited so we want to begin with our story.
Bookmarking our Story
Earlier this year some of us began drawing handmade bookmarks. We think they look pretty cool. Many of the kids from our school liked them so we began making custom bookmarks for them. It became a pretty well known thing at our school. In thinking about our project for the spring, we thought it would be good to sell them for a quarter a piece to the kids at our school and donate all the money to World Vision. This is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. In thinking about this project, we decided to take it up a notch and sell our bookmarks online to everyone in order to help other kids in another part of the world.
So what we came up with was an idea to learn some things and try to help out in a big way. The kids at our school have given their quarters; they do add up you know. We are now asking kids young and old to join us in this project and buy a few cool bookmarks in the process. Let us share with you what we hope to learn.
Things we hope to learn
There is much to learn in our world today about how a business works. Many today are beginning to see how their businesses have the ability to do good with the money they make. We hear running a business is hard work, but hard work can bring a profit (Proverbs 14:23). So instead of making a profit for ourselves, we figured we could learn how to make a profit and give all that money to World Vision. Pretty cool right? We think so. So here are some of the things we hope to learn:
- E-commerce and selling on the internet.
- All the technology involved in that like electronic payments, secure web sites, order placement etc.
- Viral marketing through things like blogs, twitter, Facebook and a community selling store. We are using Etsy and it is so cool!
- Product design, inventory management and order fulfillment. One of our Dads has told us this could create a bunch of work for us if this goes big. So we hope you give us a ton of work to do: printing, cutting, addressing and stuffing envelopes and mailing bookmarks out to you.
- We want to learn about entrepreneurship and doing good for others through such efforts.
How we want to help
We selected World Vision as the organization we want to give all the proceeds from our bookmarks. We chose them because our teacher shared about them with us. We like that they are working in nearly 100 countries around the world, serving all people. They are a Christian organization seeking to reflect the love of Jesus to others. We also like that they are financially responsible and accountable and most of the money will go directly to help people.
How you can help
Your part in this project is simple. Just buy a cool bookmark! Maybe buy one for yourself, your kids, your family members, the family dog, etc. The more we sell the more we give away. We have some capital investors who are helping us with materials and printing so we can give away all the profit we make from selling our bookmarks. The price you might ask? Just $5 plus shipping.
With this low price you will help us gain valuable experience and give generously to others. And of course you will receive one of our five bookmarks specially selected for this project. Great deal right!? We think so, so all you need to do is head to our brand new Etsy Shop called “The Wilberforce Girls”
Load up those Etsy shopping carts and put us to work!
Thank you and God Bless!
The Wilberforce Class 4 Girls,
