Every month Debbie Chenail (AAQI treasurer) and I sit down to update the
Show Me The Money page on the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative website. We list every expense, we add up all the quilt sales and donations, and we calculate the profits so far this year. That number is then added to our cumulative total of how much the AAQI has raised for Alzheimer’s research. (Profits: All our profits fund research.)
Do you know of any other charity that posts that kind of information on its website? I didn’t think so. Don’t you wish they all did, so you can know how the money you give is spent?! (Sorry. I digress.)
Well, we just crunched the numbers and as of the end of July we have raised…
more than $747,000
…for Alzheimer’s research. Makes me think of an airplane, you know, a 747. I just had to tell you!
The AAQI’s “bread and butter” are
Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilts. You donate them; we sell them.
So how are we doing so far? Pretty good!
Below is a graph showing Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilt sales by year, starting in 2008. So far this year we’ve raised about $56,000 through “priority” quilt sales, not counting the August auction. Last year in
Houston we sold $62,000. Plus we have three more online auctions before the end of the year. (The November auction doesn’t count because that’s the
Celebrity Invitational Quilt Auction, and those aren’t technically Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilts.)
If (and that’s a big “if”) we can do as well at Houston in 2012 as we did in 2011, and we have three auctions each bringing in $2,000 or more, we could generate $126,000 for the year in Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilt sales alone.
So what’s the bottom line?
If you’re making a Priority: Alzheimer’s Quilt and have hopes for Houston, get it registered and in the mail by August 31st. That gives our volunteers 6 weeks to receive it, scan it, price it, tag it, and ship it from your house to Illinois, from Illinois to Michigan, and from Michigan to Texas.
Keep in mind that there are already 611 quilts in that particular pipeline, and the following volunteers probably won’t be able to take a stitch in their own quilts from now to mid-November:
Your quilt registrar and quilt page maker: Beth Hartford
Your quilt scanners: Diane Petersmarck, Donna Moscinski, and Eileen O’Regan
Your quilt pricers: Ruth Langdon and Ami Simms
Your quilt tag-makers: Martha Wolfersberger, Jen Hinwood, Susan Vore, and Niki Gottesman
And, of course, we thank YOU, our quilt makers and quilt buyers!
Thank you! And please share this blog!
Ami Simms
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