As we all know, coming up with the money to let your child go on a three- or five-day camp can be challenging. However, with a dash of resourcefulness, a pinch of hard work, and a couple of handfuls of persistence, your students may be able to reduce their cost to a more reasonable amount. The recipe for success is called “fundraising.”

Before you begin, you’ll need to form a strategic fundraising plan. Set a monetary goal that you would like to reach. For instance, if you’d like to get the cost per student down to $50 each, you’ll have to raise $13,375. That’s $107 that each student will need to raise.

Choose three or four fundraising methods you think would go over well in your area, and time them in such a way that it doesn’t seem like you’re pestering folks to buy something every other week. Here are some fundraising ideas that, hopefully, can help raise enough money to offset student expenses.

School yard sale
This can be held in your school parking lot. Students and their families donate items to sell. And, aside from the cost of advertising the sale in the local paper, there are no other expenses to this venture.

Pot Luck Dinner Party
Put on your chef’s hat for this one. This has great potential, however, it requires extensive planning and coordination for it to be successful. Your first step will be to find a facility that can accommodate this particular activity. A local church may be willing to help out. Once you find the facility, you’ll need to begin ticket sales. Advance ticket sales are important, as they will help you to determine how much food to prepare.

Parents may want to get together to donate the meals, drinks, and desserts. They may even donate the paper plates, cups, napkins, etc. You can play a fun martial arts movie like The Three Ninjas after dinner. Everyone knows it’s a party to raise money for the camp. You might even auction off some private lesson with you.

Cooking and cleaning would be all that is really required of the students.

Have a little brainstorming session with your staff and students, and you’re bound to come up with even more great ideas.