Fashion Show Update

At our weekly Fashion Show meeting this past Thursday, February 28, we got a lot done:

1) In keeping with the spirit of Purim, which was last week, we announced on Shushan Purim that we would be selecting our models by casting lots, that is by choosing names from a bag. On Thursday morning, during our meeting, we sent girls from the fashion team around the school to see which female students wanted to submit their names. We'll be selecting our models this week.

2) In the meantime, members of the Fashion team working as designers began to plan what kind of outfits they wanted their models to wear. The juniors are working on one set of designs for models dressed as professionals. That's to represent the daughters of Tzlafchad, who in the Torah ask Moses if they can inherit their father's land even though they aren't men. Yeah, those girls went there, even though they lived during Biblical times! Here are the junior ideas so far:

Welcome to the new freshman designer team, made up of Miriam, Ayelet, Jessica and Racheli. Those girls are already hard at work.

3) The Finance team is busy finding out how we can work with Not for Sale to promote the organization and the work it does before and during our event. Here is the latest script we wrote for Caroline and Julia, who are going to contact Not for Sale:

Scripts for Fashion Show

Of course, we made sure Not for Sale has 501 (c) 3 status -- meaning it's a non-profit -- but we also
used social media to make certain it had enough Likes on Facebook to be considered a popular organization.
It's not UNICEF, which had 2.4 million Likes the day we checked FB, but it had 44,000, which is respectable!

4) The Arts team is working on the art exhibit for the fashion show. The art will focus on subjugation of women still happening in the world today. We've decided to do a photo exhibit and modify images using apps or other digital media. We'll line one wall of the auditorium with those photos. Right now, The Arts team is conducting research on human trafficking; Elisheva found the following site, which we posted on our Facebook page last week:

Trafficked

5) Finding kosher Fair Trade foods is harder than we thought it would be. Faculty advisor Mrs. Ahuva Mantell has been hard at work trying to find food traded fairly that has proper kosher supervision. Her efforts and the Health and Environment team's cooking event on Thursday night led us to pose the question of whether kosher supervision should mean not only that a food has been prepared according to Jewish law and but also in an ethical manner. Share your answer on our FB page:

What Should "Kosher" Mean?

Stay tuned for more info about the Frisch Fashion Show!

RS: Finance and Social Action: Lessons in Fundraising

Sophomores raise money at the Frisch Africa Green-a-thon

Sophomore Benny weighs in on what he learned from conducting a fundraiser for Innovation: Africa, an organization that uses sustainable Israeli technologies to improve life in Africa:

I spent countless hours working on the Green-a-Thon. The Green-a-Thon, a fundraiser and an awareness promoter, occurred at The Frisch School for a week during December.  While the event only lasted for one week, the preparations for the event were endless. The idea of the Green-a-Thon was to spread awareness about the over-consumption of energy, while at the same time, raise money for an organization that gives energy to energy-deprived villages in Africa. In order to blend these two ideas, we came up with the idea to make a coffee stand. We provided eco-friendly cups and sold African coffee beans. We also decided to hold a raffle. While there were many different great characteristics I was able to develop throughout this experience, one of the more important ones was the financial knowledge I obtained through leading this event.

            Leading a fundraiser takes many qualities. The qualities include strong leadership qualities, time-management skills, and most importantly, financial abilities to reach your fundraising goals. Coming into this event, I would have to say I possessed little to none of these traits. But coming out of it, I am able to say that I grew in all these areas. Most importantly, I obtained many financial skills.

             What I learnt was simple yet essential. The most important part of a fundraiser is raising funds. It is important to set a monetary goal for yourself, yet it is dangerous to set it too high or too low. We set our goal for this fundraiser at a very high 5,000 dollars. For one week, for a committee of high-school students, this is a very high number. In fact, all we really needed to raise was $2,500 dollars to obtain our goal. By making it 5,000 dollars, we were very disappointed at the end of the week when we counted our 2,700 dollars. When we realized we passed the true amount of what we needed to raise, I learned my first lesson in finances, not to set the bar too low, and possibly more important, not to set it too high.

            Another important lesson I learnt is pricing. This is a very important lesson for businessmen and storeowners. At the beginning of our week, we set our prices very high. Since I assumed that the demand for good-quality coffee was very high among the students, so I made its price very high. This was a mistake. I noticed after a day that many people turned away when they saw our prices, so we decided to lower them, and after a day, we nearly doubled our profits. This pricing lesson is invaluable to many businessmen who may be tempted to be too greedy. I was greedy when I set my original price for coffee, but after I learnt my lesson, my profit increased.

            One last important financial lesson I learnt through this experience was that too much variety is just as bad as too little variety. In all businesses, there has to be equilibrium of variety. I learnt this lesson too late for my raffle. A couple of committee members and I spent many nights looking around for raffle prizes, and thanks to the generosity of local restaurants in Teaneck, we got many prizes. We were ecstatic and thought with all this variety, we would surely make a lot of money. Sadly, this was not true. Giving people ultimatums on choice of products is important. People would come to our raffle and be turned away at the overwhelming thought of reading through all of our prizes. It is, however, important to give people a little variety. It is not a good business model to force people into buying something. We learnt this early in selling coffee. Originally, we had only asked our provider for three different kinds of coffee. And this did make money; however, after one day we realized people may want more. So we asked our provider for lattes, hot chocolate, etc. and again, our profits increased. So the important lesson I learnt from this was not too give too little choice, but at the same time, to be careful not to give too much choice. 

            The lessons I learned during this experience are invaluable. The business ethics and financial skills I obtained through this event will be very useful in life. Horace, a Roman poet, once said, “Life grants nothing to us without hard work.” This quote culminates all of the lessons I learned. To be successful in anything in life, especially finances, takes hard work and perseverance. It requires doing something, failing, and than trying it again. And this lesson is what I derived most from the Green-a-thon. All high schools teach arithmetic and mathematics, but what few teach are skills that are absolutely essential to be successful in life. And these are the lessons that I truly received through the Green-a-thon. 

For more information about The Frisch Africa Encounter, click on the following link:

The Frisch Africa Encounter

Update from RS Meeting

RealSchool members had a lot to do as we gathered for the first time since Chanukah:

Religious Identity and Video Production

The Religious Identity and Video Production teams met to discuss the content of the 2-3-minute video they plan to film about how to make prayer more meaningful for students. As RS members brainstormed ideas for the video, Marni came up with a great tagline for the Religious Identity team in general: 

Turning Practice Into Purpose

We love it, Marni! Thanks!

Religious Identity is also gearing up for its next discussion on prayer, which will be on December 26 and will cover Tefillah in Talmud. Since we began the discussion series with a look at how prayer appears in Tanakh, we thought one next logical step would be seeing how prayer is addressed in the Talmud. Frisch has agreed to allow RealSchool to host a minyan on the days that we run a discussion group, so we'll do so that morning. Penina came up with a headline for the flyer we'll post to advertise the minyan:

Be the minyan you want to see in the world.

Great stuff, Penina. Thanks go out to you, too!

Karen, who heads Graphic Design, is going to make us a logo for with the line, so we'll be able to use the logo every time we run the minyan.

Last week many of RealSchool's Religious Identity members led discussions with the freshmen about where to draw the line between Judaism and the secular world. The discussion was part of an integration program at Frisch called Greek Week. For more information about Greek Week, see Greek Week at Frisch: Cougars Draw the Line. The Religious Identity team liked the way the discussion went and wants to have more of them with the freshmen. Therefore, what came out of tonight's meeting is a three-pronged approach to creating more mindfulness in student religious practice:

1) Videos, made for and by students, about the search for religious meaning
2) Additional discussions about prayer and a RealSchool minyan on the day of the discussions
3) Continued informal discussions with the freshmen, led by RealSchool: Religious Identity members

Graphic Design and Health and Environment

Religious Identity and Video Production weren't the only teams that got things done tonight. Graphic Design also laid out an action plan for the next few weeks, so we can realize our goal of having student-made logos for each of our RS teams. Health and Environment team continued work on the green cookbook we plan to make, although we're rethinking whether we want a formal cookbook or an app/website that we update, so we have a virtual recipe folder. Health and Environment team members also decided they want to focus on giving healthy makeovers to unhealthy recipes. Whatever else we decide on, one thing is clear: a recipe for kale chips is a must!

Soon you'll be able to make these kale chips yourself,
thanks to RealSchool's Health and Environment team and
Frisch's Environmental Club

Thanks to everyone who attended tonight. We got a lot done and also managed to get in some ad hoc discussions of one of our favorite topics at RS: education reform.

Finance and Fashion

Next on the to-do list:

Finance Team events
The Frisch Fashion Show, which we'll plan this year with the school's dance team