October 2021

As I write this, Halloween is just wrapping up in our area. October has been an amazing month of us and I am excited to share 2 major events that have taken place this month.

The first thing is our fall fundraiser. Now normally we hold this fundraiser in September, but we decided to move it to the beginning of October so that we had time to set up an event we have been thinking about for years.

On October 9th we held our first ever BALL PIT CHALLENGE! The idea was the same as other fundraisers in that we held a 12 hour streaming marathon over on our Twitch channel (www.twitch.tv/theprojhope) but with the added twist that this year 6 hours of the event took place with our VP Bobby sitting in a 5 foot tall ball pit attempting to play a videogame while for every dollar we raised we added a ball to the pit. Thanks to the amazing support from our community we raised $1000. That is almost 3 times the most we ever raised before. We cannot thank our generous donors enough. This money is going to do a lot of good.

Speaking of the good it will do, on October 30th we took our first ever outreach trip to Lansing, MI. There, we teamed up with an outreach group called Punks With Lunch. They are an amazing group of people who set up events and do mobile outreach in the city of Lansing and with there help we were able to get winter coats, hats, gloves, socks, scarves, as well as other needed supplies to over 30 people who are sleeping unsheltered.

A lot of shelters in Lansing recently had an outbreak of Covid-19 and it just happened to work out that our trip coincided with this outbreak so we made sure to also include masks, hand sanitizer, and other hygiene items in the backpack kits that we handed out.

A huge thank you to Punks With Lunch. If it wasn't for them we would not have been able to reach the unsheltered community in Lansing and we can't wait to work with them again.