October is PCD Awareness Month!
It’s coming, folks. We all have an opportunity to make an impact on the progress that is made in PCD. I get excited every year for October because I find it fun to shout a little louder than usual in order to bring eyes and hearts to a cause that is SO personal. Also, I find it very rewarding to know I did something that WILL help the life of our son, others with PCD, and others to be diagnosed sooner and receive the care they need.
I’m hoping that by sharing my PCD fundraising efforts that I might inspire you to get excited about what YOU can do for PCD Awareness Month!!!
1)When our babe with PCD was about one year old, I started googling how to raise money and awareness for a cause. I was very intrigued by a fundraiser someone did for a disease with this premise: help me reach my $ goal; if I do reach my goal I will go to a Creed concert sober. 😂 This was just hysterical to me, and of course, this person blew his $ goal out of the water. Which was exciting to me as someone who likes to get weird. I recruited a handful of friends and family to join my team in the weird goal reaching consequence; “help us reach our fundraising goal, and we will wear a Justin Bieber t-shirt in public for a week.” I called the fundraiser, “Belieb for PCD.” We raised around $7,000 for the PCD Foundation. It was amazing. It also raised big time awareness for people in our lives about the rare disease our son was born with. I used a site called Crowdrise at the time to be the platform for this fundraiser. But there are lots of choices these days. Google “crowdfunding.”
2) Another year I did a Zumba fundraiser. I had asked the Zumba instructors at my gym if we could dedicate one class to be a fundraiser for the PCD Foundation. They said, yes, and that was that.
3) The next fundraiser I did was the birth of Breathe for PCD. I started a fundraising t-shirt campaign through a company named Bonfire to raise money for the PCD Foundation and also raise awareness for PCD. I apparently wasn’t able to give up on this, because I have been selling shirts ever since. I now use Spreadshirt for most of my print-on-demand shirt selling.
4) This October we will have our 3rd annual “Lemonade Stand” to raise money for the PCD Foundation. I make little flyers to put up in the neighborhood, to send to school, to email their teachers, coaches, and friends’ parents. I share on neighborhood and school Facebook groups. We set up base on the corner of our street, and we make loads and loads of lemonade, cookies, and desserts. Sometimes friends even offer to bake cookies to donate! People can pay cash, but in the past I have set up a gofundme account in which I could generate a QR code to print off. This way, people could pay/donate using a credit card. Also…friends and family out of town could still add to the efforts by having this online option. This year, I might try a different platform called, Spotfund. We’ll see. 🙃
There are SO many fun ways to raise money and awareness for PCD! Get your wheels turning and start planning for October now! Please share what you come up with!