Thanks to the superb envelope-stuffing skills of Manuela and David, approximately 150 letters are now in the mail to pro sports teams and various celebrities. If all goes well, we should have at least a few signed photos to auction off by April 8th. You can have your Toby Keith, (shouldn't that be "Shock' N All Y' All?) I'm hoping for a signed photo from Air Supply!
Also, faculty mailboxes are now exploding with professorial solicitation letters and donation forms. We'll be sending email followups shortly.
The 2004 Auction Committee met last Monday to discuss decorations for the auction this year. The theme is Moulin Rouge and Julie has some terrific ideas. She'll be sending out a call for some volunteer help sometime soon, so watch your email for those opportunities.
The notes from the meeting contain a few details of the decorations ideas we discussed, as well as a big picture look at where auction planning is at this moment.
For those of you who are looking for ways to earn volunteer hours to qualify for a grant this summer, don't worry. Opportunities to help will be increasingly plentiful in the coming weeks, reaching possibly a fever pitch in the week or two just before the auction. Meanwhile, the most important thing you can do is bring in donations! Don't you know anyone who could donate a pair of tickets to a baseball game this summer? How about some Superbowl tix for next spring? How about a tv or an iPod? ;-)
Think. Who do you know? How could they help? Then ask them!
The next two chances to earn some Auction volunteer hours/donations are coming up this week:
1) Come help stuff and label envelopes and get an hour of volunteer time toward your EJF Summer Grant application! Thursday, Feb. 26, 3-4 p.m., Hard Lounge tables.
2) Saturday Solicitation Run: Meet in the leather lounge at 1 p.m. Saturday afternoon. We'll head out in teams of 2-3 to solicit donations from likely donors around the city. This is for those of you who work during the week or have been unable to make it Fridays for whatever reason. Saturday's weather is supposed to be Sunny and 60 degrees, so there's no better way to enjoy this taste of spring than by soliciting donations for the EJF auction! Please join us!
Please note that the EJF Summer Grant Application has been updated and now includes more detailed information about what jobs will qualify for a grant this summer. Get your copy of the updated grant application from the Records Office (look for a pile of applications on the window shelf) or download it here.
EJC: Get trained to volunteer at the Employment Justice Center's Workers Rights Intake Clinic. Attend a training this Friday, Feb. 20th at 1PM in L302 (lunch provided), or Monday, Feb. 23rd at 5PM in L302. Following this training, you will be qualified to volunteer any Wednesday night at the EJC Workers Rights Clinic downtown! The clinic advises members of our community on many employment-related legal issues, including wage and hour, overtime, family and medical leave act (FMLA) violations, unemployment compensation, workers' compensation, racial discrimination and sexual harassment, and wrongful termination. As a clinic volunteer, you will use a structured intake questionnaire to interview workers about their workplace problem, and then assist experienced employment attorneys in assisting these clients.
Spring Break Volunteering: On Sat., February 28th, the coordinator of the MLK Library's VITA (Voluntary Income Tax Assistance) Program will train GW students to assist low-income residents of the D.C. area with their federal and state tax returns. After attending this training, you will be qualified to volunteer at the MLK Library (Gallery Place Metro) any evening until tax day AND as part of GW Law School's alternative spring break program, March 9-12th. This is a great chance for one-on-one client contact for a really good cause. The hours you spend in training and volunteering will count towards your pro bono pledge˜get in pledge hours on a flexible basis! To sign up for the Feb. 28th training, email Allison Clements, or stop by the pro bono information table at the information kiosk on Tuesday or Wednesday.
Come one, come all! Sign up to solicit your favorite businesses for auction donations!
What: Choose and sign up for the donors you'd most like to solicit from!
When: Tues-Thurs (Feb 17-19), from 11-1
Where: Kelly Lounge (the leather lounge) main desk.
Simply stop by the Kelly Lounge table next week (Tues-Thurs, 11-1), look at the list of potential donors, and choose a dozen or more that you'd like to visit. That's it. Once you've chosen your list of donors, you'll be ready to visit with them whenever you want in the coming weeks (the sooner the better) to encourage them to donate and to collect their donations.
If you can't make it by the table, please consult this list, pick some donors (as many as you think you can get to in the next 6 weeks), and email Ethan with your selections. Note: This isn't a scientific process. If someone signs up in person for the same donors you choose via email, Ethan will let you know so you can choose alternates.
What kinds of donations should we be seeking? Check these out:
Those are just a few of the items from the 2002 EJF Auction at GULC. So how can we bring in a few "big ticket" items like this?
Come one, come all! Sign up to solicit your favorite businesses for auction donations!
A couple of weeks ago we sent letters to over 300 past and potential donors -- mostly local businesses. Now we need to visit those businesses in person to follow up on our letters and pick up donations. As a volunteer, you can now sign up to be responsible for collecting donations from your favorite businesses.
What: Choose and sign up for the donors you'd most like to solicit from!
When: Tues-Thurs (Feb 17-19), from 11-1
Where: Kelly Lounge (the leather lounge) main desk.
Simply stop by the Kelly Lounge table next week (Tues-Thurs, 11-1), look at the list of potential donors, and choose a dozen or more that you'd like to visit. That's it. Once you've chosen your list of donors, you'll be ready to visit with them whenever you want in the coming weeks (the sooner the better) to encourage them to donate and to collect their donations.
Bringing in donations from local businesses is the single most important thing you can do to ensure there's money for your and/or your colleagues to work in the public interest this summer. Without donations, we've got nothing to auction!
So stop by the table in the Kelley Lounge next week between 11-1 and sign up for the donors you're going to visit. If you can't make it by the table, we'll post the list of possible donors here next week so you can pick your donors then.
Hey cool auction volunteer people!
Would you like to get three easy and fun auction volunteer hours? How about getting a few donations as well? To give you an opportunity to do just that, we will be heading to Pentagon City to hit up the businesses there this Friday from 1-4pm. We will meet in the Kelly Lounge (1st floor Lerner) at 1 and take the metro over (you will be responsible for the metro fare). We will get back to school by 4pm, or you can stay and do last minute Valentine's shopping, hit the food court or whatever u want. Please e-mail George by Thursday 5pm at gwu at law dot gwu dot edu if you can participate. Relaxed business casual attire will help our effort. Thanks!
Also, watch this space for more volunteer opportunities. We'll probably be dividing the list of possible donors up among all volunteers soon, so you'll be able to head out on your own and do some soliciting whenever you can find the time. Meanwhile, if you can't make it Friday, or would like to get started soliciting on your own as soon as possible, please let us know.
Suzanne Hill and Professor Zubrow offered a couple of great ideas for increasing volunteer participation, attendance at the auction, and support from alumni.
First, Suzanne knows an alum who leads a jazz band. Her idea is that we could get the band booked at a local club, charge a $5-$10 cover, then talk the club and band into donating most of the cover to the EJF. We'll get people to show up by advertising the event in the CDO's "Noteworthy" newsletter and on the alumni email list. To make this happen we'd need someone to work with Suzanne to help secure the band and venue and make sure it gets publicized.
Second, Professor Zubrow suggested we write an open letter to the GW community to be published in Nota Bene and/or "Noteworthy." The purpose of the letter would be to introduce everyone to the idea of the auction, to briefly describe its history, and to encourage greater participation. (The idea here is that too many people at GW either don't really know what the auction is for, how it works, or why we do it. This letter would attempt to explain those things.) To make this happen we'd need someone to write this letter and submit it to these publications.
Third, I've been thinking we could try to turn the auction "program" into a sort of sales/marketing piece. Of course, the first function of the program is to list the items we have up for auction; however, since we distribute so many copies, we could also sell advertising space in the program. We could make it educational/informational as well by printing brief interviews with/profiles of the public interest "power players" at GW. Which faculty teach and/or work in public interest law? Which administrators are key sources of support for public interest at GW? How do these professionals understand the term "public interest"? That would be the overall theme of these short pieces: "What is the Public Interest?"
These interviews would serve several functions. First, they would identify for all students the best people they should be talking to if they'd like to learn more about or work in the public interest. Second, they would highlight and honor GW's great public interest faculty and staff. Third, and perhaps most important, these interviews would put some flesh on the bones of "public interest" at GW. Right now, we tell people that all the money we raise goes to fund students working in the public interest, but what do people really think when they hear that? Do they have a concrete idea of what that means? By giving potential auction attendees (bidders) the opinions, thoughts, and ideas of public interest professionals at GW, we'll be giving them a better reason to attend the auction, and a better reason to give us their money. In short, these interviews could give people better, more concrete reasons to support the EJF (and the auction). To make this happen we'd need one or more people to identify the best people to interview, then conduct those interviews and write them up into short pieces/profiles we could publish in the program. Photos would be good, too.
What do you all think? Does anyone want to get to work on any of these things?
Thanks to Suzanne Hill and Professor Zubrow for inviting the EJF to speak at its summer funding informational meeting last week. For those of you who weren't able to attend, the meeting focused on funding for public interest work this summer. Be sure to read this overview of summer subsidy programs; all the application materials are here.
Perhaps the most important thing for those working on the EJF auction to remember is that you can't accept both a GW subsidy, and an EJF grant -- you have to choose one or the other. (But you should still apply for both to maximize your chances of getting one!) However, you can combine either the GW subsidies (most of them, anyway) or the EJF grant with any other outside source of funding you can get. Adding things up, you could make out fine this summer while still doing great work for the public interest.
Thanks to Scott at Life, Law, Libido for pointing to our site. As he mentioned, we're trying to "grow" the auction here at GW, so if anyone has any ideas about making it bigger and better (meaning: generating more hard cash so we can give more summer grants to people working in the public interest), please let us know!
Any other ideas and comments are also welcome, including: How does your school support its public interest auction? How does it support public interest law in general?
Thanks to JD2B for the link to our pages! (Scroll down to the links from 1/31.)
The GW EJF Auction is going to be on the digital map soon. At least we're showing up in the top ten Google results for "gw public interest auction," and we're number one for gw ejf. What does that mean? I don't know, but it's a good thing, I think.
Better still, we now have our pages on GW's server. All the auction pages are now mirrored at http://www.law.gwu.edu/stdg/ejf/. We should have a link from the GW Student Organizations page shortly. (Well, I've sent the email asking for that link, so I assume it will appear shortly.)
With these changes, we should probably reconsider the overall organization of our pages. For example, the first page people reach if they arrive from the Student Orgs page should give them more general info about the EFJ at GW. If anyone has any suggestions, please comment away (below).