It’s the final hours of the AAEYC conference. It’s winding down and conference attendees and exhibitors are heading home. I’m waiting for Pete to come and assist me in packing up. I’m looking forward to getting home. Pete is now in the former banquet room of the historic Eagle Hotel, attending a committee meeting on fund raising.

I tried here to talk with conference attendees about fundraising and on this subject they paid me no mind. First of all, the BLBP is dealing with the donation mentality. Their mindset is, I will give you books but not money. Secondly, there is the swag mentality. Books are in their mind swag, which is free. So don’t ask for money. Into the swag bag the pens, notepads, Post-Its, candy, stickers, and other feel good materials go.

From Alys's ED Foraker Training

My hope is that conference attendees will pass our bookmarks and project information on to others. This, for us, is publicity. It is not free publicity – it takes a lot of time on my part to put the information together and distribute it. This was a three-day conference. I spoke to numerous educators. This was a considerable investment of my time. I also gave a presentation entitled Have I Got a Story for You. It took a lot of time putting this together. It went well; I talked about book share, shared a few books, then had the participants share their own stories. The level of engagement was quite high.

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Lunch today was good. The buffet included salmon and quinoa salad. I was hungry because my morning presentation was so early. I chowed down.

We parted company with a lot of books. Alas, I didn’t have enough board books or little children’s books. The boxes that were brought in from Palmer yesterday afternoon were mainly young adult books.

I don’t want to do any more lengthy events like this one by myself. There’s no break time when just one person is running the dog and pony show. Also, it is no fun eating dinner alone

My going solo this time around got me to wondering about the fate of the Bright Lights Book Project. Sure, we can come up with a succession plan for when Alys gets tossed under the bus, err hit by a bus. Pete has three quarters of this information on his thumb drive, and I have the other quarter on my computer. What we need are individuals who are invested enough in the project to say, “Hmmm. Alys and Pete are doing an awful lot this week. How might I give an assist?

I used to think that the primary attribute of being a good leader was showing by example. In my case, this was by working hard. My hope is that all will work hard at fundraising, knowing that getting individual funding will show corporate funders that we have a sound donor base. And we’ll take this funding and hire on staff members, who will further assist with our funding efforts.

We’ll see. BLBP board members and volunteers lead very busy lives, so I most likely will keep the dog and pony show going as long as I can.

Here’s what’s happening this week:

On Monday, February 24 at 9 a.m. Pete and I will be interviewing an AmeriCorps worker and see if she’s a good fit and we are a good fit for the BLBP.

On Monday February 24 at 5:30 p.m., Mike Walsh of the Foraker Group will leading a WORK SESSION (Robert, this a quasi-retreat) on BLBP Board Governance and our Strategic Plan.

And this Friday, we’ll be hosting our third field trip. Third grade students from King Christian Academy will be spending the day in the former banquet room of the historic Eagle Hotel. The day’s theme will be dinosaurs. I can use assistance on Thursday getting ready for this.

This is all for now.

Alys

Next: 54. 2/23/25: The New Normal