Let's Talk Money

How can college kids afford a project like this?

By MARK PERRY

When I first had the idea to travel with Caring Hands Africa and make a documentary about the work that they are doing, I knew it would be an expensive trip. Traveling this far and for this long was a new experience for me so I didn’t even know how to begin to start thinking about budget. I brought the idea up to my roommates as we tried to put together a budget and ended up with a budget of roughly $8,000, little did I know that that would so far from what it truly costs. We continued working the budget through the preproduction process and we found that every time we worked on it, the total continued to increase. At the end of the semester we finished with a budget that rounds up to $20,000. And holy cow, that is a lot of money, especially for a college student. 

But through it all, God has been faithful. I have been amazed and extremely grateful for the way that friends and family have gotten behind this project. We were able to raise support through a couple different ways. Each of the different avenues were critical in getting our team to Cameroon. 

R&K Sub and Pretzel Sandwich Fundraiser 

Our first step to raising the funds for the project was a sub and pretzel sandwich fundraiser during the summer. Through this fundraiser, we were not only able to bring in some seed money to get us started, but it acted as a crucial marketing step. It was the first time we were able to push the name of the project and to start telling people what we were hoping to do. When it came time to deliver the subs, we were able to put a sticker on each sandwich that had the branding of the project on it and the social media. 

“But through it all, God has been faithful.”

T-Shirt Sale

After we got the logo and branding finished up (big shout out to Hailey Guit for helping us with this process), we began putting together the mockups of the t-shirts. After a lot of research on different t-shirt printing companies, we decided to go with Home Field Advantage based out of Hanover, PA. We printed out a small order of shirts for those part of the project to start wearing and get some promotional pictures taken. This lead into our big push on selling shirts. In total we printed just under 150 shirts. This process was really awesome because it allowed me to not only make some money for the project, but it allowed me to talk about it to even more people helping to raise more awareness of the project.

Support Letters

We went a bit traditional and dropped a large pile of support letters off at the post office. These letters provided me the opportunity to introduce my project to people who may have not heard about it yet, and it let me add a personal note explaining why I felt this project was important. We got a huge response to these letters. It got to the point where I was going down to my mailbox everyday and taking out three envelopes of donations that people had sent.

GoFundMe

We also did some classic crowdfunding for the film. We went with GoFundMe because of the missional nature of the film, and GoFundMe does not take any platform costs other than the processing fee. We had 36 different donors on GoFundMe which was really awesome. 

 

To wrap things up I’ll just say this, I have been so amazed, and encouraged by the way people have gotten behind my team and this project. It truly is only possible because of the generosity of everyone supporting the project.  There were a lot of stressful nights working through if it was even possible to get close to enough money for this project, but through the process it became clear that if you are supposed to do something, the way in which to get there will come. 

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15 Minutes of Fame

Our first big screening of the film was with the senior showcase in May 2020. The next step for the film was to submit to a variety of film festivals. We got some great news from the 15 minutes of Fame Festival.  15 Minutes of Fame is a Film Festival based out of Florida, and is a collection of films produced anywhere in the United States or Canada that are under 15 minutes in length. Submitted films were viewed by a panel of five judges and the highest scores became official selections. We got our Official Selection notification at the end of October. It is with great anticipation that we look forward to the digital screening of the festival that runs for the month of December. We are one of two documentaries being screened.

Before being brought on to this project, I had already edited numerous short documentaries and short films both at Stevenson and my various internships. I knew how to organize and prepare footage, but I was only doing it at a semi-moderate level. Most of the time, the footage was on the same hard drive as the project and I was only dealing with-on average-maybe two hours of footage in any given project. I knew that this would be a totally different animal so I had to make sure I was ready.

I like to play with hypotheticals in my down time. It could be what would happen in a class, or writing a project, or a later conversation I’m going to have with a person. They’re easy to come up with and I can think of some crazy hypotheticals when I want to. Going to Africa was no exception. I was going to a place I was unfamiliar with having no experience in Africa with Alang having made the mission trip once before. Since he grew up in Cameroon, I felt better, but that didn’t mean that butterflies went away.

I woke up at 3:00 am the day we left for Toube. My mind was coming up with all types of ideas on what to expect to see in Toube. Would this be when culture shock hits me? Will I feel like I’m starving myself to death? Will I be able to handle some of the sights I see? I didn’t go back to sleep. Everyone else woke up around 5:00 am. The ride to the boat was one of the smoothest rides we had so far. There were actually roads (most of the trip) and they weren’t in terrible condition. Plus, not many cars were out at 6:00 am (understandable). Police/military were patrolling the roads and pulled us over a couple times wondering our reason for traveling. Geh showed his military ID and explained what we were doing as other men shined flashlights into our van. We were cleared to go but it was a little nerve wracking watching men with guns tell us whether or not we could go and wondering what would happen if they told us to exit the vehicle.

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