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Every year the preschoolers and staff of Circle of Love Preschool in Manhattan Beach, CA look forward to raising funds for the Pacific Southwest District’s ”Hearts for Jesus” charity fundraiser. Director Nancy Durkovic explained, "For the last two years, COVID has gotten in the way of us doing the things we normally do like bake sales, etc., so we have had to be creative."
This year two of the classrooms, PK-Yellow and PK-Peach, did a Read-a-Thon with pledges per book. The Intermediate-Blue room did a coffee and pastry sale in the morning for parents. One of the teachers of the youngest age group, the Beginners, did a Saturday fun day for her class. The Transitional Kindergarten classroom did a Valentine's candy sale and sold a lot of candy. The PK-Green room made hand-made soap and had a soap sale. All of the classrooms were very successful and raised a lot of money.
Every child received a decorated donation box in which they collected coins during the month of February and part of March. They then deposited their coins in a treasure box in their classroom. The coins were then deposited in a big glass jar in the office. "We actually had to resort to two jars because we received so many coins!", Nancy shared.
"The other fundraiser we did was something we do every year for Hearts for Jesus! One of our former families owns a few restaurants in the Simmzy’s family of restaurants, and for the months of February and March, they are giving us 20% of their proceeds from their take-out orders! We are waiting for their total so that we can have a grand total! So far, we have raised over $2000.00, with more to come!" Nancy exclaimed.
Another new thing this year is that they partnered with the church to make Hearts for Jesus their February “Mission of the Month”. The people of First Lutheran helped raise over $400.00! "That was awesome and we are going to continue that tradition!" The church's LWML also voted to donate $200.00 to “Heart for Jesus”.
Nancy says, "We send flyers home to our families and talk about the fundraiser with our children during Jesus Time, but we do not do anything special to get our families to give. It seems that we have very generous families who like to give from their hearts and help people in need, especially those in need of a Savior!"
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