Girls With Opinions Book Club: Fundraiser for the Wildlife Center of Texas

So, a few of our members (okay, just kidding ALL of our members) are animal nuts. A few of our girls are desperate to volunteer at the Wildlife Center of Texas. For those readers who are non-local or not in the know, the Wildlife Center of Texas is a non-profit wildlife rescue located in Houston that rehabilitates wildlife and returns them to the wild. We have brought injured doves there more than once. If you find an injured animal, you place in in a box, do NOT attempt to feed it, and then bring it to them. They do not charge a fee but do accept donations. It is a wonderful place to visit as they have a lot of educational displays/materials as well as 3 teaching animals on site. There are two owls (one screech and one great Northern) and usually some type of hawk or falcon in the center (it rotates. when we were there last it was a Cara Cara). You have to be 16 to volunteer at the Wildlife Center of Texas. My 9 year old daughter feels this is desperately unfair and had been writing poetry for weeks about the injustice ;) Three of the Girls With Opinions are on a swim team together, and they have sold homemade jewelry at some swim meets to raise money for the team. Since they are not old enough to volunteer, they could do that same for the Wildlife Center!

This was not actually an official Girls With Opinions project,but we realized later that all the friends included were also members of the book club. So why not share this project with our readers? ;)

The girls got together a few times to make shrinky dink charms for the jewelry. They decided to make bracelets, necklaces, keychains, and wine charms. Shrinky dink paper can be purchased at Texas Art Supply in large packs of blank sheets or on Amazon. The brand we like is Grafix and we use the Matte style. The sheets are transparent enough to trace images, but when they shrink, the shrinky dink appears more white on the background. On Amazon, they can be found here.

The girls printed images of wildlife animals from Google Image search. My daughter's trick is to search everything with the word "Chibi" after (which gives you pictures of cute animals). We copy the images to a word document and resize them. The images should be 3 times the size of the desired final image.

They worked on making a zillion charms over a few afternoons. Based on the size and shape, they were grouped into necklaces, bracelets, keychains, and sets of 4 for wine charms. The necklaces and braces were made with rainbow loom. The keychains were bought at Michael's and fastened with jump rings. The wine charms are hoop earrings with beads added and bent up at the end with pliers.

Two of the Girls with Opinions got inspired and made signs to go up around the neighborhood. We went around to 10 local businesses to hang up the signs. Everyone was super friendly and allowed us to hang them up. Here are two examples of the adorable hand drawn signs:

In front of the ever awesome MytiBurger, a local burger place run by a guy who always supports the community. His staff went above and beyond and allowed the girls to tape it in the front window and they were so happy.

One of the dads, Glenn Ferrell of JF Ferrell Inc built the girls an awesome stand for the fundraiser. They live on the corner of a busy intersection in the neighborhood, so it was the perfect place to set up the shop. Glenn also set up some lemonade for the girls to offer visitors for free. This is a great addition, as we sold out of jewelry in a very short time but were able to still give visitors lemonade and information.

this picture was posted on our neighborhood homeowner's Facebook group to let people know about the sale.

the girls flagging down street traffic

The girls raised $603.55! Amazing! SO many wonderful people came to support the girls' project and made generous donations.

This picture was posted on the Homeowner's page to let folks know the final amount raised

The following Monday, we took the donation to the Wildlife Center with the girls. They were amazed by how much they raised. And one of the experts there taught the girls about the owls, cara cara, a possum, and a peregrine falcon. It was awesome!