Hello! My name is Allison. I am 31 and have been married for 13 years this December. My husband and I have 5 kids who range in age from 12 years old down to 4. We opened a cupcake bakery on 2/11/11 called The Crazy Cupcake. One of my favorite quotes is “I learned to give not because I have much, but because I know exactly how it feels to have NOTHING.” This is exactly why I started The Wishing Star.
The Wishing Star was born in the fall of 2011. I wanted a way to give back to the community that had essentially been supporting my family since we opened our shop in Feb. I decided to do a food drive to benefit Second Harvest Food Bank (a local food bank). After a few days {it gets a little hazy here… not quite sure what and how it happened} we heard about a family that needed a Thanksgiving Dinner and had missed the application cutoff date for assistance from another local nonprofit. So I decided to shift from a canned food drive to a dinner drive. Then I decided we should see if anyone else needed help. I felt funny having people come to The Crazy Cupcake’s Facebook page to request assistance or even to ask about donating so I knew I needed to make a separate FB page. I played around with names for a while before deciding on The Wishing Star. I felt like that was the perfect name for what I wanted to do:: Help grant wishes.
We provided 7 families with a complete Thanksgiving dinner that year {and donated 29 pounds of food to Second Harvest}. The awesome folks at Main Street Cafe donated pies and rolls. One woman cried when she came to pick it up. She told me she had worked for a really long time and then was forced to quit when she got really sick. She couldn’t believe that we were helping her. It was awesome and I knew that we had to keep it going after Thanksgiving. I also realized I needed some help and recruited a new friend Katy to help!!
For Christmas, we asked people to send us their request for help along with their kids ages, likes/dislikes etc. Then we hit up social media. I asked Crazy Cupcakers to bring in donations. A Crazy Cupcaker’s Hubby works at a local grocery store and he gets to pick the charity that the store donates to every year. They picked us!!! They donated us 25 COMPLETE Christmas dinners!!! Since we had the food covered we only had to find donations for gifts. Then we had a wrapping party at the shop to wrap all these presents. Thank to everyone who donated, we provided Christmas to 25 families!!! They had food, clothes, jackets, personal products, candy, and gifts!!!!!!!!!!! It was so amazing.
And the rest is history… We helped 5 families with Easter dinner and baskets for Easter 2012, for Back to School 2012: we helped 15 families get ready for school with new clothes, backpacks and school supplies, for Thanksgiving 2012 we fed 25 families, we still don’t know how we did it, but we gave 51 families an amazing Christmas in 2012!!!!!! Then this Easter we assisted 10 families with dinner and baskets.
The crazy thing is we did all that without actually being a nonprofit. We are not a 501(c)3 corporation so we can’t give businesses tax deductions. Which really limits our donations and we can’t get grants to help fund our projects. I have decided that I want to expand The Wishing Star and the only way to do that is to incorporate and file for tax exempt status.
And that’s where your donation will come in: We need $1100 to file our articles of incorporation, and to file for 501(c)3 status. We also need to rent a PO Box which is $45 a year and a storage unit {to store any extra donations we may receive} which is about $850 a year. And then we would like to have a few hundred dollars as a cushion to put in the bank and anything over that will go to our Back to School drive.
We have some super perks for all of our donators. If you donate $25, you get a custom, limited edition piece of jewelry from Artistic Icing. She is awesome and makes amazing jewelry. Another of my favorite perks is for a $5 donation {which for me means, no Starbucks today, but will fund 1/600 of this project} you get a handmade Thank You card. Each card will be handmade and one of a kind. I figure since I have 5 kids, I can use their art skills to making great cards for our contributors.
The way the last 2 years have gone, we have been doubling the number of families we help at each holiday. So that would mean that we will need to help over 100 families this Christmas!! The only way we can help these parents and kids, is by becoming a legal non-profit.
Even if you can’t help right now with a monetary donation, you CAN help by sharing this for us on Facebook, Twitter, and the internet!!! Help us get the word out about our project so we can continue helping our community one family at a time!
THANK YOU!!
