MCR-SGA Fundraising Tour (The Fun Tour)

The Montgomery County Regional Student Government Association, more colloquially known as MCR, is a student-led organization in Montgomery County, Maryland. The group advocates for students from all walks of life across Montgomery County, and is made up entirely of students from the county’s high schools. MCR partners with high school student governments across the county in order to understand the issues plaguing said schools, and works in tandem with them to solve problems. MCR holds monthly meetings to provide opportunities for students to raise issues, review agendas, and discuss solutions. But how are these meetings held? Who funds them? To answer that, we’ll look at the work of one specific department in MCR, the Finance Department.

The Finance Department does exactly what you would expect it to do; fund the

organization to keep it running. This year, that's accomplished mainly through a new idea called the Fundraising Tour, or the “Fun Tour.” The Fun Tour was a plan conceived by Finance Department Directors, Drew Skilton (a Senior at Walter Johnson High School), and Ishaan Puri (a Senior at Paint Branch High School). The concept of the Fun Tour entails partnering with the student governments of Montgomery County High Schools to arrange restraint fundraisers in each school's cluster. Visiting all 26 of the county’s high schools is, simply put, not realistic. So instead, the Fun Tour focuses on choosing fundraising locations that multiple high school clusters could easily attend.

The goal of the tour is to raise money for MCR and school governments by partnering with local businesses. Secondarily, this also gives students living in that area who don't belong to MCR the ability to communicate directly with students who do, and bring to their attention grievances which they may not be already familiar with. The first stop on the Fun Tour was at a Chipotle near Walter Johnson High School, and although the results could’ve been better, the finance department is very optimistic about the future of the Fundraising Tour.

As Finance Director Drew Skilton said “It is of great importance we can have these kinds of events, so MCR [can continue] to spread it’s awareness and message, as we are the voice for every single student regardless of where they live.” Skilton gis very confident about the direction and message of the Fun Tour. The tour will continue until the end of the school year visiting up to two schools a month. Stay tuned for more updates on the next stops.

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