A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of meeting Postie Drew face-to-face when he was selected to be a Postie Reporter for CollegeFest 2007. We’d communicated several times prior to that, but only via e-mail. After spending two days watching Drew blog, live vlog, and interact with those attending the tradeshow, I truly realized what a talented, passionate blogger he is. If you know Drew I am confident you share my perspective.
So when Drew started telling me about a special “project” he was working on, I told him I would do whatever I could to help him with it. Here’s an overview of what I’m talking about:
Drew is putting together a calendar compiled of photos he’s taken for his blog BenSpark.com. Inspired by the Green Fingered Photographer, Drew put together a calendar of his own and began selling them through Lulu.
“I loved his photos and figured that I could do the same thing,” states Drew. “I’d been working for the past year on getting my 15th high school reunion planned. We were running the event as a reunion as well as a fundraiser for a former classmate, Becky, and her family. They have an online journal of Mike’s progress: http://www.caringbridge.org/pa/machinski/index.htm. Becky had thyroid cancer and many treatments, her Cancer went into remission. Her husband Mike then got Cancer and has had over 120 chemo treatments in his lifetime. He had Hodgkins lymphoma that returned twice, and is now in Stage 4. He cannot get insurance and neither can his wife. They have three beautiful daughters and financially life is kicking them around.
But at the same time they are optimistic and very involved as a family. The three girls are really involved in sports and despite his disease and pain Mike coaches the girls teams. Becky runs a store where she makes custom jewelery. Her website is www.hopecreationsjewelry.com. The income that they make is not enough and I wanted to help however I could so I decided to dedicate the full amount of my profit on each calendar to the Machinski family. I make $2.97 per calendar sold. All of it was donated to the Machinskis at my 15 year High School reunion. At that time I had only sold 12 calendars. I did however put up a donation button and got almost $100 in donations for the Machinskis form Posties and other people I had met online.”
“At the reunion we raised (along with the calendar and online donations) over $1600 (from a silent auction and the tickets sold to the reunion itself) for the family. They were very very excited but I know that it can’t possibly be even near enough for them and I wish I could do more. So I’m donating the profit from each calendar sold to the Machinksi’s until January 1, 2008 and then I’m retiring the
calendar.”
I think this is a fantastic cause, and a great story. I know Ted loves charity storis as well, so I wanted to help Drew out. If you’re interested you can contribute here: http://www.benspark.com/2008calendar.html. And if you have any similar stories I’d love to hear them. Please feel free to share them either via the comments feature here on this post, or directly with me at ashley[at]izea[dot]com.
