Taylor - Blog #2

In addition to hosting photo shoots at hundreds of hospitals, Flashes of Hope chapter directors and multiple professional photographers travel to pediatric cancer camps around the country to photograph hundreds of children in one day. When Flashes of Hope attends a certain camp for the first time, staff members from the Cleveland headquarters have to accompany the local chapter director to ensure everything runs smoothly. Once it is confirmed that the chapter director can manage the camp activities independently, members from the headquarters no longer need to be involved in subsequent years. Since Flashes of Hope is a non-profit, there is a strict yearly travel budget for the staff members at the Cleveland headquarters. So, yesterday, Hannah, the Chapter Director and Public Relations Coordinator, assigned me the task of being the “travel agent” for the headquarter representatives who travel to the camps. I had to find the cheapest airfares, car rentals, and hotel rates for each trip to 15 or so of the camps that will take place within the rest of 2011, while managing to keep the total travel cost within the yearly travel budget. While this doesn’t sound too hard, it was actually the most frustrating task considering most of the camps are literally in the middle of nowhere with no hotels in sight. It was also impossible to find airfares that were reasonably priced. So, it took me practically the whole day. But, the good news is that the total cost for all of the trips was significantly less than the travel budget, so the extra money left over can be used for Flashes’s fundraising events. During the next couple days, I will start to work more with the nationwide fundraising program called Kick-It, which I will explain later on.