On a rainy day during spring break at the San Joaquin Memorial High School campus in Central Fresno, alum Natalie Angelillo is talking a walk down memory lane. The Seattle mom was a student there nearly 20 years ago: cheerleader, class president and homecoming queen. She remembers doing her fair share of fundraising: "I think I've been fundraising since I was six for something or another. I was a Girl Scout, a Brownie. It started early."
Now that she has school-aged kids herself, Angelillo wanted a more efficient way to raise money for schools. So she launched SwopBoard last October: "It's a community based marketplace, like a Craigslist or an eBay. But where a piece of the transaction goes back to your kids' school." Anywhere from 10 percent to 100 percent of the sale can go to the school. Users can also choose who they sell to and can post wanted items too. Angelillo says, "My own school, in just a short period of time, has raised over $4,000 just by buying and selling to each other. Every school in the country is already in our database so anybody anywhere can start using it right now."
Memorial's water polo team needs a new pool. Right now -- it's not deep enough to host playoff games. It'll take $600,000 to make the necessary changes. So the school has partnered with SwopBoard to start raising that money. School President and CEO Lisa Nilmeier says she's excited, "People like me, I'm a parent here too, they wanna give back to the school. And what an easy way to do it. I've got a closet full of stuff at home that I could get rid of and donate to the school that I would do. The fact is, it's money not items so that's even better."...which has the Panthers hoping this latest fundraising campaign really makes a splash.
