I am no stranger to doing fundraisers as I have done them for local animal rescues, church organizations, and church events. I have set up bake sales, participated in car washes, and helped with spaghetti dinners through the years. This experience helped give me maybe a "false belief" that fundraising for my service dog wouldn't be that hard, however I would soon come to the crashing reality of how hard fundraising would actually be!!
The first challenge that I ran into was that the normal locations that I would hold fundraisers at for the local animal rescue such as Boscov's and Chick Fil-A would deny me to hold a fundraiser there as I was NOT a nonprofit or organization. They refused to do fundraisers for individual people:( I couldn't even put up a flyer at their locations.
The second challenge would be that advertising or spreading the word for it would also be an issue for the same reason. I would go to the local pet places, grocery stores, and the local VFW only to be denied putting up my flyer since I was raising the money for myself and not an organization such as AZ Goldens or a nonprofit.
I would try posting my GoFundMe page on different Facebook pages and social media platforms only to not receive a single donation other than from a friend.
I would also find the struggle of the economy right now to play a big part in the challenges of fundraising! People wouldn't or couldn't donate simply because of the increased prices of everyday things and their now tight budgets. I would struggle with the costs of doing a bake sale or online auction because of the increasing gas and grocery prices.
I also thought that fundraising around Christmas time would be the perfect time to fundraise as people would surely want to buy baked goods or donate, however I quickly realized that was also not the case. People would deny my offers for baked goods because they already did their family baking or had received enough baked goods, friends would sadly apologize as they had already donated financially to their usual yearly charity, and I would be competing against local kids that had fundraisers this time of year for their school activities or hobbies.
Even with all these challenges, I refused to completely give up and managed to place a donation jar at a local Dairy Queen and post some flyers at local businesses. I will continue after the holidays to ask around local businesses to place either my donation jar or flyer up.
So this is the latest update on things. I continue to struggle to fundraise, do research on ANY service dog agency that doesn't charge $20,000+, and or have a 4 plus year waiting list to even be considered for a service dog! I won't give up on this dream of mine and the freedom and independence that a service dog would bring me!
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