Chloe Jeon
From holding a fundraiser to donating to Dimond Care in Oakland and Julie’s Care Home in San Francisco, July was filled with new beginnings, opportunities, and paths for our organization. This month marked the start of our efforts to fundraise by selling masks. Our fundraising event involved lots of work creating signs, tables, posters, videos, and of course, the masks we were going to sell. However, the hours we spent both before and during the event paid off, and in more ways than just the funds we raised. This new effort to raise money simultaneously allowed us to give more people access to PPE (especially our cotton masks), thus accomplishing two goals at once! It was an excellent starting point that paved the way for our online store, another new endeavor that has worked out better than we had originally planned. Additionally, we donated to Dimond Care for the first time. It’s always wonderful to see familiar faces like the Parkview Senior Center, especially when seeing those faces means that the recipients enjoyed our masks so much that they wanted more. However, it’s also great to reach out to a broader range and distribution of people, as well, and I am so glad we got to donate to these two facilities this month. Finally, after the busyness of June, we were able to put together another virtual concert for everyone watching our YouTube channel! It was fun being able to go back to this familiar routine in the midst of all this new. I’m grateful for both the new and the familiar opportunities and experiences we had this month, and I’m excited for what the future has in store for us in the coming months.
Andrew Choi
July was a busy month, especially in terms of trying new things out for EBPPE. Earlier in the month, we tried out a fundraising campaign by starting a store with masks, ear savers, and hand soaps. The event went well and we would consider it a success. One thing that we had to consider this month is the continuation of our benefit concerts. We have been preparing our pieces for a video each month and we have been thinking about getting more viewership on our benefit concerts especially with the ongoing effort it takes to choose a piece, practice it, and edit the video. We have started brainstorming ideas to do different things with our music, not just benefit concerts but maybe we could start looking into rehearsing bigger pieces together in person (socially distanced, of course), but nothing is certain for now. We also participated in a farmers market booth for a senior living home and donated PPEs to passersby. It was a pretty relaxing event while we casually handed out PPEs and had small interactions with people. It was enjoyable and I was glad that we were able to volunteer for the group, especially since they were also participating in the previous events for donating PPEs. Helping them again in this situation was enjoyable and being able to volunteer for more organizations like them was rewarding.
Ella Jeon
This month was busy, but exhilarating. We put much effort into many factors of our organization, including a fundraising website. There was much effort put into building the website itself and taking the pictures of the different designs to upload. I was able to talk to some of our customers, discussing dates, designs, and sizes of the products they were planning on buying. It made me happy to see our products were selling well, and grateful to see so many people willing
to help support our cause, helping to fund us. I think the fundraising website was a great part of this month and has really made a difference in our organization. Another big part of this month was a volunteer event at the farmer’s market. There we met some of the fellow volunteers we had worked with in the previous month, at the other big volunteer event with packaging PPE and delivering in a drive-thru format. They were very kind and welcoming, talking to us warmly and making pleasant conversation throughout our hours together. As for our main purpose in the volunteer session, we would offer bags of PPE and cold ice water. The PPE bags were mainly for the seniors and the waters were offered to everyone. It was a scorching hot day and the heat was hard on everyone. It was great to be able to help other people out in that heat, especially since we were all working hard together. Finally, we also had another Music For Heart concert, which was great. I look forward to what creative and unique ideas we may be able to come up with for future concerts!
Erin Yang
This past month has a lot of new changes, which was really great. We started the EBPPE fundraiser store which I think was the biggest accomplishment of the month, and also attended some PPE donation events. We also had our July concert as usual. I think one thing we should do is to try and spread word about the benefit concerts more because we worked really hard to perform these songs, so it's kind of a waste of our time and energy if only a few people get to see them. Or perhaps instead of just a concert every single month, which gets boring, we could make music videos with a purpose. For example, relaxing music soundtracks or maybe movie music medleys. There was also the idea of story telling with music for sound effects in the background, which is something interesting to think about. I think something like that would be a lot harder to arrange though, since we'd have to set up a meeting with certain kids to be the audience, which might get even harder as we go back to school. At the ombudsman booth where they gave out free PPE to seniors, I had fun despite the intense heat. It feels really nice seeing people thankfully accept the PPE we offer and the lively atmosphere of the event made everything quite pleasant. One of the people from elegance living also offered us soft serve which I appreciate very much. At the event, they also asked us some questions about our reasons for volunteering and our plans for the future and it really made me think about what our goal was before and is now, and whether it changed at all. I think at the very root of it, we volunteer because we have the privilege of being able to and the benefits of doing so, even if they aren't material, greatly outweigh the costs.
