Yard Sale Fundraising for Women In Data Science Datathon Workshop: Unravelling the Challenges of the Female Brain
Fundraiser hosted at Chloe Wu’s (Lynbrook High School) house, led by Ranya Zhang (Homestead High School) with invaluable contributions from Chloe Wu, Elaina Li, Russel Wang (Homestead High School), William Xue (Palo Alto High School) and Cherry Chen (not pictured) and her sister to make it all happen!
Author: Chloe Wu
On March 22nd, 2025, the CP Mentorship wellness committee hosted a yard sale fundraiser to raise money for our Women in Data Science Datathon Workshop that will be happening on April 13th, 2025. We needed to get our hands on some money quickly in order to buy food, gifts, awards, and rent chromebooks for our event.
At our next meeting, which was about a week before the yard sale, we discussed options to gather funds. The most promising option was to sell books, clothes, etc. in public spaces such as parks and libraries. However, after a Google search, we discovered that permits were required to sell goods in these spaces, and we couldn’t quite figure out how to obtain one quickly. The next best option was to hold a yard sale.
So, we picked our location and established a meeting time. Everyone was to gather their personal items that they were willing to sell before the end of the week into boxes and load the boxes onto their cars so they were ready to go.
The day of the yard sale was on a Saturday. In the morning before 10 AM, we went around neighborhood parks to put signs up. A large whiteboard with the fundraiser information was also put up in front of the house. Tarps were put out, and we all displayed our items, which were mostly books, on the tarps. As we were busy marking prices by sticking post-it notes onto the covers of the books, we welcomed our first customers. They bought a set of two AOPS Geometry math activity books for ten dollars. We received a lot more customers over the next three hours.
One thing that we noticed was that the math textbooks were popular among our customers, and they were willing to pay a lot more for them than we anticipated. Therefore, we ramped up our price to ten dollars for each book, which is double of what our first customers bought their set for. We concluded that this was because the neighborhood we were holding our yard sale in was right next to a school with a very competitive culture, especially when it comes to math and science.
We had a lunch break at around 1 PM. All the students and parents gathered in the garage, and we had pasta, chicken, broccoli, and tofu. We talked and laughed while enjoying our food, and it was a nice moment where we all got to know each other better and have fun together.
After lunch, we stopped getting as many customers because it was lunch time, and everyone was probably having lunch in their homes. After half an hour of not getting any new people, we decided it was time to clean up. We put our items back into boxes and loaded them into our cars, as well as folding up the tarps.
We ended up raising more than $500 in total from cash, PayPal, Venmo, and Zelle in just four hours, which was well beyond our expectations from this yard sale. Getting to interact with customers as well as gathering together and working as a team to hold this successful yard sale was a challenging but exciting experience.
