One of my biggest surprises about this little bloggy has been discovering that it is read by far more people outside of our town than those here who actually know us.  I looked through yesterday’s stats and was blown away to see that over 80% of the people who visited the blog yesterday are NOT from good ‘ol Cleveland, TN.

I know what you’re thinking.  “She knows how to figure percentages?”  Ya’ll, don’t be silly.  I was far too busy rearranging my ponytail holders, so I had Imaginary Boyfriend calculate the stats for me.  Besides being incredibly good looking, he’s a math genius. 

Anyway, I get several emails a week from the interlings asking one main question about Starlite: how do you get funding?  The answer to that question would take more than a few bloggy posts, but I thought I’d give you a little glimpse into the funding side of it.  I’ll do a post sometime soon about how we actually get the money; it is quite the interesting process.  Just to peak your interest, we receive more regular monthly donations from construction companies than churches.

I know.

Today, however, let’s talk about something much happier: how we spend the money!

When you’re running programs for girls in grades 3 through 12, there is a whole range of items you have to buy.  We have the regular weekly items, of course: tortilla chips, processed nacho cheese, plastic nacho containers, cups, napkins, drinks, etc.  Our ten regular weekly programs all serve the same menu (nachos); but our special dessert Bible study for our oldest high school girls serves something different each week.  During special ”themed” weeks, we do something different to spice things up a bit.  

For example, all of our elementary school programs had a special snack last week that was themed around Easter.  We got to the schools earlier than usual and set-up a ”party” — yellow plates and napkins with white cups.  We had nachos on the plates but also gave them a pink bunny Peep and some jelly beans.  They also received a treat bag that had an egg with candy in it, a plastic carrot filled with pixie dust candy, more jelly beans and an Easter pencil.

Why they love the holiday-themed pencils, I do not know.  However, I am happy to report that the pencils were almost as well received as the pink bunny Peeps.

We spent $100.00 total on all four schools for that week’s program.  That included all the food and all the craft supplies.  Not too bad, right?

Here’s how we do it:

1. Dollar Store — I can’t emphasize enough how much we use our local Dollar Store.  Our town finally got a Target a few weeks ago, so we’ve already started using their Dollar Stop section as well.  As our programs have grown so much in the past year, we’ve started having to go to several Target stores or several Dollar Stores in order to get what we need, but it is worth the drive.

2. Buying in mass quantity – When our programs first started growing, I didn’t really like shopping for them because I didn’t know how to shop for mass quantities.  Over the years, I’ve learned that there are some things we should buy in large quantities and some things we shouldn’t.  For example, we buy enough containers of processed nacho cheese in August to last us ’til December because it doesn’t go bad for three years.  Isn’t that disgusting?  However, we don’t buy the boxes of chips more than a month in advance because they do become stale — and no one likes stale tortilla chips.

3. Buy in advance — This is probably what helps us the most when it comes to “special” purchases we make.  Here’s an example: early this morning, I went by our local Walgreen’s to see if their Easter stuff had been marked down yet.  It was, so I bought them out of small plastic treat cups (they’re normally $.25 each and I got them for $.06).  I also bought 25 bags of Easter grass at 75% off.  See for yourself, courtesy of my camera phone:

You can’t see all of the cups, but I got 186.  Might sound like a lot, but it will be only about a third of what I estimate we’ll need for next Easter.  So, we’ll be hitting more sales like this over the next few days.

In order to keep track of purchases like this, I keep a Word document that is divided into months for the coming year.  So, later today I’ll go into the “March ‘09″ file and put an entry reminding me that we have purchased 186 Easter cups and 25 bags of Easter grass for the elementary school programs.  I’ll also put a note in there to remind me where I bought the stuff so that I’ll have tips on where to look next year.

Of course, the downside to us doing this is the fact that we never know how many girls we’re going to have a year from now.  For example, before it started, we estimated that 15 girls would attend the program that I am leading this semester. 

And, um, 70 little girls come every week without fail.

Which reminds me of another note I should put in that file for next year:

“Amy Beth: Whatever you do, DO NOT offer to lead one of the elementary school programs next year.  Stay in your office; it is much safer there.  Be free from the processed nacho cheese.  Be free indeed.”

And the people interlings said amen.