The Great Give Away
University of Miami’s 1st Great Give Away University of Miami’s 2nd Great Give Away
The Great Give Away is a customizable and self-sustaining service-learning program that enables an organization to host an incentive-based relief drive. This drive will directly benefit those in need within the organization's local community, while educating the organization’s members about active citizenship and helping others!
The Great Give Away’s purpose is to help both its participants and recipients maximize their potential for awesomeness, with the hopes that they will continue to reap the benefits long after the program’s completion.
The Great Give Away provides the opportunity to develop a direct-service project that is reinforced with The Art of Being Awesome educational curriculum. The Art of Being Awesome educational curriculum focuses on cultivating leadership skills by helping Great Give Away participants gain a better understanding of themselves and those they are working to help while instilling the ideals of love, compassion, and awesomeness.
We accomplish this through various group & personal reflection activities which focus on our
ABCs of Awesomeness:
A: Accepting Your Awesomeness
B: Being Awesome
C: Creating Awesomeness
The Great Give Away not only satisfies physical needs with donated goods and services, it also fulfills emotional needs of recipients by providing a break from their difficult situation. This “getaway” is created by The Great Give Away’s volunteers, who plan and execute a first-class distribution event catered to the needs of its recipients. During this event, the recipients will be given the opportunity to participate in a free Art Of Being Awesome seminar in addition to the goods and services they will receive. Furthermore, recipients will receive informational materials that can guide them to local resources and provide them with the inspiration they need to continually improve their situation.
Through past Great Give Aways we have made great strides towards making the world a better place by engaging approximately 300 volunteers, collecting more than 17,500 articles of clothing, helping roughly 800 impoverished citizens, distributing almost 4,000 U R Awesome Shirts, and inspiring thousands of people to support our efforts! 
Thus far, The Great Give Away has been hosted twice at the University of Miami’s Coral Gables campus by the student group Random Acts of Kindness. Our goal for the first Great Give Away was to collect 10,000 articles of clothing to give to impoverished citizens in downtown Miami. In less than three weeks, we collected 11,151 articles of clothing and distributed 2,000 U R Awesome Shirts to our donors. We then sorted the clothing by size and gender to prepare for our distribution event, which coincided with World Kindness Day. As we arrived at the distribution location, we were welcomed by a long line of enthusiastic recipients who applauded as we exited our vehicles. We promptly set up our tables and tents, and within five hours we were able to help 481 impoverished citizens by providing them with clothing, reusable shopping bags, and U R Awesome Shirts. The remaining clothing was donated to homeless shelters in the surrounding area.
During our second Great Give Away, we focused on improving the overall process to ensure that The Great Give Away’s success could be repeated year after year. Although we had a smaller goal of collecting only 2,500 articles of clothing, we collected more than 6,500 articles in less than two weeks! We deepened the impact of the second Great Give Away by conducting group reflections with our volunteers throughout the drive and by providing our recipients with food and hygiene kits in addition to the reusable shopping bags, clothing, and U R Awesome Shirts they received. We also enhanced the distribution event by utilizing an indoor location provided by the Miami Rescue Mission. This helped us created an extraordinary experience for every recipient that walked through the door. Each recipient was assigned a volunteer who walked them through the distribution process, helped them pick out clothing that fit their needs and, more importantly, provided them with superior service that simply made them feel awesome. Through surveys conducted at the event, both volunteers and recipients highlighted these one-on-one interactions as their favorite part of the distribution experience.
Both the U R Awesome Shirts and The Great Give Away have been tremendously successful in every way we hoped they would be and more! This success was made possible by the contributions of our many sponsors Artees, Chick-fil-A, Dennys, Lowes, M&M Bus Services, PODs, Power Pizza, Publix Charities, the Miami-Dade community, The Miami Rescue Mission, the University of Miami, and our dedicated volunteers.
Hosting The Great Give Away can take between 4-10 weeks and consists of five stages:
Preparation, Fundraising, Collection, Distribution, and Conclusion.
The Preparation Stage is used to arrange locations, sponsors, and volunteers for The Great Give Away. During this stage, participants will also be introduced to the Art Of Being Awesome curriculum, providing an educational backdrop for the drive.
The Fundraising Stage consists of selling U R Awesome Shirts, which fund The Great Give Away.
The Collection Stage is an incentive-based relief drive in which the donors of relief items, cash donations, or volunteer hours each receive free a U R Awesome Shirt in exchange for their contribution, while supplies last.
The Distribution Stage involves the final preparation and execution of the distribution event.
The Conclusion Stage consists of tallying and announcing results, conducting exit surveys, examining feedback, and showing appreciation to all those involved in The Great Give Away.
Organizations interested in hosting a Great Give Away should start by submitting an online application choosing to meet a specific Great Give Away goal based on its capacity and its intended recipients. Along with this application, applications will be asked to submit a budget to be reviewed and approved by our Great Give Away Team.
ALMOST NOTHING! All costs approved in an organization’s Great Give Away budget will be funded through sale of U R Awesome Shirts by the hosting organization during The Fundraising Stage. Hosting organizations may also seek sponsorship for any additional goods or services they wish to provide to their recipients.
The only financial investment made by a hosting organization is a security deposit used to fund the production cost of the initial batch of shirts.
EXAMPLE: The security deposit would total $2,000 for a batch of 500 shirts at roughly $4.00 a shirt. The 500 shirts are then sold for $10 each, totaling $5,000 in return, which will be used to fund the drive and refund the security deposit. Following our one-for-one business model, once this initial batch of 500 U R Awesome Shirts is sold, the hosting organization will receive 500 shirts to will give away to its donors and recipients.
Once an organization has sold its first batch of U R Awesome Shirts for its Great Give Away, a second batch of custom U R Awesome will be printed to fit the organization's preferences, including colors, slogans, and/or logos that represent the organization’s members, supporters, recipients and their Great Give Away as a whole.
Along with its initial batch of shirts, hosting organizations will receive documentation that provides instruction on each step of The Great Give Away process, as well as examples of flyers, palm cards, and other marketing tools to help promote the drive. More importantly, each organization will be assigned a Great Give Away Coordinator. The Great Give Away Coordinator will facilitate an organization’s Great Give Away by providing guidance through each stage of the process including the Art of Being Awesome Curriculum.
Phone: 305-707-7344
Email: URAwesomeDay@URAwesome.org
Snail Mail: PO Box 432835 Miami, Fl 33243
Facebook: Facebook.com/URAwesomeInc
Twitter: Twitter.com/URAwesomeInc
YouTube: Youtube.com/URAwesomeProductions & YouTube.com/SignOfTheDay