Helping Hearts, Blog of Anne Sanders

Relay for Life season is coming to its end for 2013. Over the past year, you’ve heard about my preparations and fundraising for my church’s team Angels for a Cure. It’s the last time I’ll be able to say I’m on a team of Angels, at least one that raises money to fight against cancer. We went out with a bang. We won fifth place overall for fundraising and got first place for most number of laps walked. We went to the silver team level, raising over $4500 which was $1,000 over our goal. It was an amazing year, starting with a garage sale last October and finishing with photography sessions this April just a couple weeks before the actual Relay. We also had our first ever Chili Cookoff and a two-day bake sale to end all bake sales. We auctioned off donated items at the Elks annual auction and ate at Ruby Tuesday’s, getting ten percent for the team. We sold over $900 in luminaria as well as several trackmarkers, something we had never sold before. We had the final team part...

Happy Valentine’s Day and Random Acts of Kindness Week! It’s time for an Angels update. My Relay for Life team Angels for a Cure did so great on our bake sales. We made nearly $900! People were outbidding each other for cakes and we had enough cookies to feed half of Pensacola. The extras went to the Waterfront Rescue Mission Sunday night meal and the minister there was so grateful to get them. We just had our Giveback days at Ruby Tuesday, too, on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I won’t know how we did on that for a couple weeks. It’s the first time we’ve ever done that, so I’m interested to know how it went. We passed out about 250 flyers and invited people through Facebook. Then our team had our meeting at Ruby Tuesday and had dinner there. We get 20 percent of sales back when people show the flyer we gave out. Our next fundraiser, a Chili Cookoff, is going so well except for one thing—no ticket sales. I’ve gotten donations of cookies and drinks from Publix. We’ve got eight chili ...

What were you doing two Saturdays ago? If you’re like me, life is so busy that you can hardly remember what you did yesterday, never mind two weekends ago. But I had been building up to Saturday, October 20 th for a long time because I’m the captain of an American Cancer Society Relay for Life 2013 team.   We had our first fundraiser the 20 th . It was a great big yard sale in the parking lot of our church. My team is called Angels for a Cure because we operate out of our church, the Gulf Breeze United Methodist Church . I’ve been going there since January of 2004 and we became members in 2005 (I think, once again the mind reels at all to think back that far.) It wasn’t until 2010 that I found out we had a Relay team. We’d gone to other Relays, supported my husband’s work team, my sister’s team and so on. Have you ever been to an event? There’s a Relay for every 60,300 Americans and there were 5,146 Relays in 2010. There were Relays that year in 18 countries outside th...