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Cooking Our Way to New Computers

by Carol

When I was teaching in a small, private, high school we decided to try to earn money to purchase new computers for our computer lab by selling cookbooks. We asked the students, and staff, to bring in their favorite family recipes. We were looking for things like Grandma's special apple pie, and so forth. It was a great success. We received enough recipes for two cookbooks, one for main dishes and one for desserts.

The students in the computer classes put the books together and decorated them. The great part of doing a cookbook fundraiser like this is that you have built in purchasers of the book. Who doesn't want to buy a cookbook with grandma's favorite recipe in it?

We used cookbooks as an incentive to sell. If you sold 5 books you got one free. A number of families bought multiple copies to use as gifts for their family members.

One thing to remember is to keep the price down. By creating the books ourselves, and getting a parent who was in the printing business donate the printing (he received free advertisement in the book of course) we kept down on our costs and made a good profit. We were able to buy 5 computers and I believe the cookbooks are still around and have become family keepsakes.