Today I'd like to introduce my friend, Mindy and her precious family. We met last year and have been arranging our children's marriage ever since! I'm so thankful to have Mindy sharing some fundraising ideas!
Hello! I'm Mindy, and I'm excited to share our some of our adoption fundraising adventures with you today. We adopted our son (and Haven's future husband), Silas, domestically in August of 2013. All said and done, the adoption cost us $35,000, and we were able to raise the entire amount! My husband is a pastor, and I am a part-time teacher, so we don't exactly bring in the big bucks, but when we stepped into adoption, we knew God would provide.
Call me crazy, but I actually loved the fundraising part of adoption. It was a lot of hard work, but it gave me a reason to get creative and plan fun events. It also connected us in greater ways to our community and to the broader adoption community. But, the biggest thing for me was seeing God at work in our story. The blessings that He poured out on us through fundraising confirmed that He was with us and that we were right where we should be.
Our fundraising consisted of a wide-range of things. To name a few, we held garage sales, recycled cans, sold items on Instagram, Etsy, and at boutiques, applied for a grant through our church, and hosted a dinner/silent auction. The dinner/silent auction was definitely our most successful fundraiser, and we were able to raise $7,000 in that one night! You can read the details of that event here. We also created a postcard to pass out and sent out a letter to friends and family, announcing our plans to adopt, inviting them to our auction, and letting them know ways they could support us. We received many generous donations from friends, family, strangers and anonymous givers. We were overwhelmed with support and so blessed by the generosity of people in our lives.
James 1:27 says, "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." I think we can be assured that if we follow God's command to care for the orphan and choose to step into adoption, He will provide all that we need. And all of the hard work is so worth it when that child becomes yours.
If you're interested in learning more about our adoption story or just seeing more pictures of our little guy, you can check out my blog at www.melinda-ann.com.
Interested in receiving more information about fundraising and access to resources to help you fund your adoption? Then working with an adoption consultant might be a good fit for your family. Email me at leah@christianadoptionconsultants.com.
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