As summer begins to wind down and thoughts of a new school year start easing their way into the mind, memories like shadows cast portraits of your child’s early school year beginnings. Little faces captured in photos of those bygone days are priceless!

This is a great opportunity to encourage parents to capture a different, unique, and fun image of their child in shadow. An image which can be framed and displayed for years, like those little hand prints set to plaster.

All you need to start this fundraiser is an idea and phone. Fundraising can be fun when you know how to go about setting one up. This fundraiser is going is one of those fun and easy ones.

Start by arranging, with the school, a day for the “Shadow Portraits” to be done. You can then ask for volunteer artist to help draw the kids side view image, of their face, on paper. These volunteers could be art teachers and local artists.

You’ll want to let them know that this is going to be a fundraising event for the school. Schools, like everyone else, have felt the sting of the economies dwindling structure, so by letting artist know all proceeds will go to the school, for unfunded school activities.

Visit art supply stores and hobby shops to procure material donations needed to make this fundraiser happen. Ask them to be sponsors of this event and include fliers about their stores, with receipts, when parents purchase these “Shadow Portraits”. Encourage parents to seek their child’s art supplies from these donating stores as a thank you to the donating companies.

The materials needed would be pencils, small lamps for creating the shadows, black paper for the silhouette image and heavy poster board for the silhouette to be glued too. You can purchase a few rolls of butcher paper to wrap the portraits in individually, as the packaging, then tie them off with twine. This creates as artsy look. Tag each individual package with the name tag of the purchaser with their phone number for easy contact once the images are done.

After setting the date, let the public know about the “Shadow Portraits” via the local newspaper or by handing out fliers as students start enrolling for school. Be sure the time and date is set before school begins.

Don’t forget to speak this fundraiser up as parents come in to enroll their kids. Suggest that grandparents might like one for themselves too. Always mention the reason for this fundraiser and state by helping out their child will benefit from the activities in store for the coming school year.

Speak with the local artist about what would be a fair and appropriate fee to charge for these portraits. Since you wont be providing them framed, you might be able to ask a price which would speak to the pocketbooks of all involved.

Be prompt in getting the portraits to parents once they are finished. Have them pick them up at the schools their child attend. So that information will need to be attained when ordered.

As with all fundraisers, have donation boxes set up at all schools partaking in this fundraiser. This way even if portraits aren’t purchased, parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles might be willing to make donations just because their child attends there.