The Business of Caring : 3rd-Graders Make Holiday Cards to Raise Money for the Homeless
Twenty pint-size entrepreneurs at the private Wildwood School in Santa Monica have gotten into the spirit of Christmas, launching a holiday greeting card business with the aim of helping the homeless.
The 8- and 9-year-olds produced, designed and created the cards by themselves. And business is booming. During one two-day period, the youngsters pulled in more than $200 from sales to parents, teachers and other students. The cards cost from 85 cents apiece to $5 for a package of 10.
The third-grade entrepreneurs plan to use their profits in January to buy supplies for the homeless: socks, hats, blankets, sweat pants, sweat shirts, water bottles, toothbrushes, toothpaste, Band-Aids, canvas bags and--what every Southern Californian needs--sunglasses and suntan lotion.
The children have been using their morning recess on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to market their cards.
They got the idea to start the business from seeing the homeless on the streets, said their teacher, Lisa Glassman.
“The children had an interest in the homeless problem,” Glassman said. “It kept coming up in class discussions, so we talked a lot about homelessness, what it means to be homeless, and what the homeless need.”
The students began meeting in late September to hash out the finer points of the business. Using secret ballots, they elected company officers, including a president, vice president, finance, marketing and art chairpersons. They named their company the Cartographer’s Card Business, the name they had chosen for their class because of their interest in maps.
The budding business moguls set up committees and decided how to manage production of the cards. “The last couple of meetings were difficult,” Glassman said. “They fought about everything. Nobody was willing to compromise about anything.”
But eventually the youngsters learned to work as a team. Glassman, who has taken a hands-off role during the effort, said she watched the third-graders pick up a pivotal business lesson: “Sometimes you have to learn to swallow your pride and think about what’s good for the business.”
Glassman volunteered to finance the project, buying all the supplies, with the understanding that she would be repaid out of profits.
Beginning in early October, their classroom was transformed into production grand central about once a week. The workers toiled in rows of 10, each with their own job. While one production line folded the paper into cards, another line colored them and a third stamped the back of each card with the company logo: WW, for Wildwood.
“They got really good at it,” Glassman said, describing the division of labor.
She said the main production problem was boredom. To combat it, the children cranked up the radio and worked to music while they churned out more than 800 cards in six weeks of production.
Production standards were high. If a card opened backward or was sloppy, it was returned to the culprit to see if it could be fixed. If it couldn’t, it was tossed out.
But they kept their eye on the bottom line.
“If somebody got fingerprints or something on them, we would cover them with snowflakes,” Glassman said. “Every time we would hit a hundred or a certain number of cards, the whole class would cheer and that would encourage them to do more.”
As Nicky Kislinger, finance chairperson of the business knows, having a high inventory of product is crucial. “You have to have a lot of product. You have to have a lot of your product,” he said.
Other things such as teamwork are also important. Said Louie Stephens: “You really have to work together.”
But most of all, “You have to know how to use the money,” said Hilary Fasen.
The class knows that giving a customer back the wrong change does not make the best impression or bring them back. So they practiced handling money and being cashiers with play money before touching the real thing.
At the end of each business day, the youngsters balance their “cash register” receipts against their sales slips for that day.
The class has not decided which homeless shelters will receive the clothing and other items. “What it’s going to come down to is who needs it the most,” Glassman said.
In their classroom on a small green-slate board, the students have written what they think being homeless can mean, everything from going without a shower to getting hurt.
“We learned that it’s much harder to be a homeless person than you think,” said Jacob Silverman, president of the nascent business.
But, as third-grader Ashley Hamza wrote in a poem about being homeless, what it also comes down to is this:
Smelly.
Uncomfortable.
Not like you belong here.
It’s not the world you.
Belong in.”
The third-graders hope to make a dent in that feeling.
