Fundraising

Little Lomans
By MEGHAN COX GURDON
May 9, 2008; Page W11
Wall Street Journal

There comes a moment in the life of every parent when the startling proportions of one's altered state are manifest. Only a few years ago, there you were, falling in love, getting married, and having a baby. Now suddenly you find yourself standing in your living room surrounded by boxes of scented candles or cookies or poinsettias that you somehow have to put into the hands of all the people who agreed to buy the stuff when you and your child went trolling for business months ago. Perhaps a line from the old Talking Heads song goes through your mind, "My God, how did I get here?"


M.E. Cohen
In the past 30 years, school fund-raisers that involve children going door-to-door, and parents selling to friends, co-workers and such automatic soft touches as grandparents, have spread across the country like lice in a second-grade class. As a result, American children have transmogrified into a vast, seething sales team, forever being asked by schools to push products. According to the Association of Fund-Raising Distributors and Suppliers (AFRDS), America's schoolchildren are now shaking down the populace for nearly $2 billion a year.
The ubiquity of the practice can be seen in the AFRDS finding that 80% of American adults last year "supported" at least one school fund-raiser. Some poor saps -- ahem -- contributed to nearly a dozen. A survey in 2007 found that 94% of elementary-school principals ran fund-raisers to supplement their budgets. For parents, fund raising has become virtually inescapable, whether their children receive public or private education, whether their neighborhood is white- or blue-collar. For their part, principals tend to use the money raised for science lab equipment, band uniforms and bonuses -- even teacher salaries.
Many schools rely on so-called turnkey fund-raisers, such as Sally Foster, a gift and wrapping-paper outfit, that induce children to sell products in order to win prizes ranging from plastic straws to iPods. One is reminded of the nice trinkets those Dutch gentlemen offered the Indians for Manhattan. The inducement for educators: Half of all Sally Foster sales go to schools. Other methods of rattling cash loose from adults include selling magazine subscriptions, candy bars, Christmas wreaths and frozen desserts.
School fund raising might once have had a character-building aspect -- and perhaps still awakens the sales superstar within the occasional 9-year-old -- but in the moist atmosphere of the American consumer hothouse, it has grown wild and sent tendrils in every direction.
Mary Anderson, a Washington mother who for five years ran the Sally Foster campaign at her children's parochial school, felt that she glimpsed the nadir this winter when a co-worker approached her with a costume-jewelry catalog. "The brochure," Mrs. Anderson said, "had been sent home with this woman's two-year-old by his daycare!"
Mrs. Anderson didn't want to buy any new baubles, but turning her co-worker down was especially awkward "because she'd been such a good customer for my gift wrap!" Saying no to the child of an acquaintance or friend can seem like failing a loyalty test. Other parents can get huffy if they've bought more from your kids than you've bought from theirs. Some mothers agree to mutual nonaggression pacts by determining ahead of time which items they will "buy" from each other's children after perusing the catalogs in their own homes.
Neighbors face delicacy of a different sort. The buyer, or, as we say in the children's retailing business, the "mark," has the option of either forking over cash for products she doesn't need or looking into the trusting, liquid eyes of an ardent young person, ruefully shaking her head, and saying . . .
"No, I don't need it!" expostulates suburban Washington mother Amy Freeman, wrathfully recounting what she wanted to say when two winsome children rang her doorbell a few months ago and held up the dreaded catalog. Within minutes, she'd caved in. "I felt hamstrung, pinched and cheap," she says. "It was only $23, but it felt like tithing. It felt like these sweet little dimpled hands were rummaging around in my wallet and I couldn't stop them."
The worst part of that anecdote, for me, is that those two little peddlers were mine. Yet I too have fund-raising scars, such as the one left in my checkbook after our eldest daughter sold $250 of novelties and I accidentally threw away the envelope full of money. Then there was the time our young son lost the slip of paper listing who in our neighborhood had already paid for tins of flavored popcorn. He and my husband spent several evenings trolling the streets like Ancient Mariners, bearding residents to ask whether they had purchased caramel, chocolate, cheddar or kettle corn.
Apart from principals being able to buy educational extras, can school-induced selling possibly be good for children? I doubt it. In fact, I suspect there's a link between these fund-raisers and the entitlement mentality rampant among teenagers and young adults. Unintentionally, American culture is encouraging children to move from entrepreneurialism to franchise operations . . . to panhandling.
When quite small, children might bestir themselves to mix a bit of sugar, water and lemon juice in order to grossly overcharge the neighbors for 50 cents a cup. Aw, a lemonade stand! How cute! Soon come the depredations of the bake sales, the magazine-a-thons, bike-a-thons, jump-rope-a-thons, the selling of pizza kits and geraniums and jewelry.
By the time children are in middle school they're seasoned (and sometimes cynical) veterans. Experience has taught that adults will pay cash for even the cheapest trinkets; that, moreover, many will tell them to keep the change. Little wonder, then, that anecdotes abound of children eventually dropping the pretense of offering any value for money and simply holding out their hands for loose change, like hobos.
One mother in a New York suburb was nonplussed recently to encounter a group of girls in front of the supermarket shaking down passersby so that their volleyball team could take a jolly excursion. Mortified mothers have discovered their small children going door-to-door, dunning neighbors, after observing older saleschildren at work. "What's worse, the neighbors actually gave my daughter money!" says Betsy Hart, a parenting writer in suburban Chicago who promptly marched her then-6-year-old back down the street to repay her creditors.
Happily, for adults who feel a tad oversupplied with "opportunities" to "support" America's schoolchildren, there is hope. Jon Krueger, spokesman for the AFRDS, says that with virtually every school in the country involved, fund-raising has "gotten to a point of saturation." In other words, it can't get any worse -- can it?
Mrs. Gurdon reviews children's books for the Journal.