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The Assist Club Feature Team: PJVBC

Author: Julie Matthews
March 24, 2015

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Julie Matthews

Director of Content & Social Media at The Side-Out Foundation

Julie blogs about her personal experience with leukemia and life from a patient’s perspective.She also writes about Side-Out news and events.She is a race walker, a dog lover, and a dedicated explore.org #bearcam watcher.

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Puyallup Juniors Volleyball Club (PJVBC) in Puyallup, WA, was one of the first clubs to sign up for The Assist Project, and one of the first to earn The Assist Project t-shirts! They took the time to answer several questions about how they incorporated card making and fundraising into their club season.

• What kinds of team building activities do you like to do with your club players?
  Our team likes to get the whole team together with coaches and often times parents to get to know one another off the court. In the past we have done bowling, putt putt golf, hiking and often times just go to a restaurant or someones home for a team dinner.

• How did you fit The Assist Project in with your club’s activities?
  We posted the fundraising website just prior to a tournament we traveled to in Oregon and basically got the word out about what we were planning. Each parent collected spare craft supplies that they had at home. It was pretty easy to get supplies together as we all had quite a bit of it at home. We all brought a small batch of supplies with us as we traveled to the tournament.

• Where did your teams meet to make the cards? Did you make it an event of some sort?
  When we arrived at the tournament we knew we played in the afternoon pool so we made a team bonding event out of it to attend after breakfast on the first day of play. We gathered in a conference room and pulled out the card making supplies, played the Assist Project video for the girls and went to work.

• How many players created cards?
  There are 13 girls on our team and 2 Coaches. We knew we had to make at least 45 cards. Within about an hour the cards were completed. We also took time to make a special “Thank You” card that we could post on the website to thank all of our donors.

• What did your players do to make their cards special?
  The parents brought so many wonderful craft supplies that is was easy for the girls to give each card a special touch. Not only did the girls use paper and colored pens, they also used jewels, fabric, sparkles, ribbon and all types of pretty things to make each card special. We were actually very impressed with their creativeness and also the poetic and touching words the girls expressed on each card.

• How did you incorporate fundraising?
  As soon as the idea was introduced, the girls and parents were able to reach out to their spheres of influence to ask for donations and support. The response was both surprising and immediate. The website that The Assist Project provided was easy to implement across Facebook and other media sources that we all had access to. We actually surpassed our original donation goal 4 times over which was very rewarding. For the most part, our fundraising was limited to both Facebook and emailing potential donors.

• How did players and their families respond to The Assist Project?
  The Assist Project was perfect at fulfilling a desire to do some type of Community Service Project. The idea of it came at just the right time as our girls were contemplating what they could do as a team to help the Community in some way off the court. I think all of our families have been touched by cancer is some way so the motivation to help was immediate. The Assist Project was a very rewarding experience and I am sure our team will appreciate being able to ‘Assist’ again next season.