WOW! It has been a long time since we wrote anything! Sorry! I think we got so busy over the summer that we didn't think about it much. You can always go to our page on Facebook to see what we are up to. Go to Gabe The Cake Man and we usually put something up every week or two.
So here is a quick update. The hospital project is going GREAT! In fact, we have seen two sets of pictures and it is pretty exciting to see things happening in a country so far away, yet the internet makes it seem like it is next door! Samaritan's Purse sent a photographer to our house to take pictures of us making some cakes and cupcakes about two weeks ago, because I guess the story of the hospital is going to be in their catalog! We are super happy about that because we love it when God is getting more glory for letting us be part of this project! Each time we think He is done, it seems that He is not!
Some of the cupcakes and a cake we made during the photoshoot
We delivered the cake to a family that has donated to both of our projects
Samaritan's Purse photoshoot
We had been praying about what God wanted us to do next, ever since we finished raising the money for the hospital. I started to think it would be so cool if someone would donate a bakery to us. I still think that, actually. My idea was that we would try to have expert bakers and chefs come and teach homeless people, or people that needed a job, how to cook. We would let people buy things as "donation only" and that way if someone came in and was hungry, but couldn't pay for their food, we would just give it to them. Maybe someone else would have paid a little bit more, and it would all even out.
One day my mom and I were talking about that idea to someone at church and the lady told me about what Scarlet's Hope is trying to do. They are trying to open Scarlet's Bakery. It is a non-profit organization to help women that are coming out of the adult entertainment industry get some new job skills and make some money to get on their feet. When I heard about this, it sounded so close to the idea I had been thinking about, I just knew this was the next thing God wanted us to do! So Livvy and I prayed about it. We went to visit the site of where it is going to be and talked to the people that will run it, and we decided to do our 1%. Remember how when we were doing our project we would ask people to just do 1%? In our case, we wanted to have a team of 100 people that would each raise $350. But how it actually worked out was we had about 160 people donate and some were able to do 1% and some could only do a little bit. But as you know, God raised all the money!
Scarlet's Bakery is trying to raise $100,000! So Livvy and I pledged to raise $1,000. We were able to raise it pretty quickly, and we've been making cakes for the people that donated! (Thank you, if you are one of them!) But we still feel like we should help. So now we have been encouraging others to do their 1%. Remember, 1% is the least whole number you can contribute. Many times people say, "It's the least I could do," when they do something nice. But is it really? Sometimes it is not even 1% because the person could have done more. They just didn't want to! Yes, it is the least, but was it the least whole effort? We saw children who were only 3 & 4 step up and do a whole lot for the hospital project. Campers at elementary camp gave up snack tokens and middle school students shoveled snow or went without birthday presents or Christmas presents so the money could be donated instead. When we at least do the 1%, we make a difference!
Livvy making a cake for her Sunday School teacher who donated to the bakery project
Doing the free-hand Snoopy on the tie for the cake for Mr. Tom
Livvy doing the piping around the cake
Mr. Tom and Livvy when she presented the cake to him
We made a video about one of our cakes to explain why we think the Bakery is important. If you'd like to see it, click the video above. We are really hoping that others will see that they can help the Scarlet's Hope women make a new life through the power of Jesus and the help of those of us who love Him.
Thanks for reading our latest post! We will update soon when we have more news of the hospital!
Livvy and I have been having a lot of fun by taking our new puppy, Teddy, and our adopted dog, Kayla to the nursing home for pet visits. Since Teddy is only about 7 months old, he really doesn't know how to do this very well yet. But as long as Kayla is around, he will stay close by.
The first time we went to the nursing home, Kayla put her head on a lady's lap and pushed her nose under the lady's hand so the lady would pet her. When the lady started petting her, the woman also started telling us all about the dogs her dad used to have and how much she loves dogs. Later, when we were signing out of the nursing home, the activity director told us that this is super unusual for this woman because she has Alzheimer's disease and doesn't usually tell about her memories!
The next time we took the pets, we met a woman named Tessa and her mom, Barbara. They really loved the dogs! They begged us to stop and see Barbara again when we came back.
The third time we went with the pets, we looked for Barbara but we couldn't find her. She was in a wheelchair the first time we met her and was recovering from something. We were pretty sad at first and then we thought she might have already gone home. Just before we were about to leave the nursing home, she came around the corner WALKING with her walker! She is doing so much better just in the two weeks between visits! She was so happy to see us! She kept saying, "I know you! I know these sweet dogs! Let me pet these sweet dogs!"
If any of you that are reading this are thinking you don't have any talents to use to do your 1% and help others, consider going and just visiting the residents! They really get lonely and bored. So far everyone we have visited has been so happy to see us and has even let us pray with them! We love doing this! We really hope you will try it!
Livvy and I would like to say, "Thank You" to everyone for helping us last year! As we think about everything that happened last year it is so amazing it almost feels like a dream! At this time last year, we had raised 16% of the money to build the hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
My sister Abbey when she got engaged to Taylor Mason
My sister got engaged on January 4, 2014 and it was such a busy time for us! Her wedding lead to us being on tv when we made her wedding cake; which lead to the Muhammad Ali Center finding out about our project. That lead to us being part of their Congo14 celebration and their Humanitarian Awards.
Livvy and I both gave a speech at the 2014 Muhammad Ali Humanitarian Awards
Livvy did a great job at giving a speech in front of the 750 guests!
When we gave a speech at the 2014 September Humanitarian awards about our project, we had raised $22,048 by then and someone in the audience heard our story and was so moved by our project, they donated the remaining $12,827!
So what has been going on since then? We have been on tv a couple of times again. Here is a link to one of the shows. This one is called, The Local Traveler. Click on The Local Traveler to watch it. It is only 14 minutes long. :)
Well, we have now given two classes in cup cake decorating and cookie decorating. We raised some money to make Shoe Boxes for Operation Christmas Child and we are getting ready to make a birthday cake - well actually, 7 full size sheet cakes for Muhammad Ali. We are super excited because we are going to get to go back to the Bakery at Sullivan and use their big oven to make the cakes! We love going there! I hope to work there someday. In fact, I would actually volunteer there if they would let me!
We taught how to make Fairy Drop Cookies and decorate them
Livvy helped teach too!
Livvy has just gotten a kitten for Christmas and I am writing a dog-training manual because I hope to get a Corgi puppy in the spring. We are also working together with our mom to write the book about our project. We have been investigating starting our own non-profit organization because we have more projects we would like to work on to help others.
Livvy is so happy to be a kitty-momma again!
We hope you all had a great year last year too. Make sure you stop by our page on facebook to see what else is new. It is Gabe The Cake Man.
Livvy and I learned several things about fundraising as we did our project this past year, and we thought that some of you who are doing a fundraising project might like to see what we feel like we learned. We owe a special THANK YOU to our wonderful Cousin, Jessica because she is our "Great Idea Girl" and to Sarah Edmundson for answering our post when we were feeling pretty discouraged back when we started and everyone was saying they "Loved what we were doing" but no one was really supporting what we were doing. These are in no particular order.
1. Sit down and brainstorm the different ways you can earn money or inspire donations. (for us, we came up with making cakes for people that donated, making youtube videos to explain the project, making flyers and speaking at churches and schools. We also wrote letters to people that we thought might be able to help us).
2. Involve your friends. (This is a good idea because they have great ideas, and it makes it way more fun. Plus, they can talk to people that you don't know, but that they know).
3. Break your project into smaller pieces. This was how we came up with the Number 1 Team idea. We realized that if we could get a team of 100 people to each raise just 1% of our project, which was $350 - and that would just be asking 35 friends to raise $10 each or 10 friends to raise $35 each, we would have our hospital in no time at all. This is not exactly how it worked out because some of the children that helped us were super young so their 1% was maybe $150 or $170 but that was huge for them and they did really creative things! This actually worked out super well for us!
4. Talk to EVERYONE about what you are trying to do. (This one is pretty hard because sometimes you get tired of always talking about your project, but we did find that many people told us they found it inspiring.)
5. PRAY. This one was huge for us. In fact, this was pretty much the whole point of why we did what we did. We wanted a project that was so big, we couldn't do it without God's help. We really believe He did help us!
6. Ask other people for help to do things you might not know how to do. For example, I had never made a wedding cake before; so I asked my mom to see if Chef Dodd would give me helpful hints. What we found out was a lot of times people gave you even more help than you asked for, and that went a long way!
7. Do things even when they are hard! This was another really big one for us! We did NOT like to speak in front of people when we started this project! But we knew that people needed to hear about it, so we went outside our comfort zone and did it anyway. This really worked! We were not too excited to speak in front of 750 people when we went to the Humanitarian Awards, so we practiced a lot! This helped a lot because we had our parents listen to us and give us advice about the speech. It was because of this speech that we got the really huge anonymous donation that finished our project!
8. Celebrate when something good happens! We had a party when we hit 15% and that made it super fun! We would have dance parties in the kitchen when a really hard cake was done! We would ask our friends to be in our videos to celebrate what was going on. This is super important, because sometimes you can get discouraged otherwise, and when you keep having a party, even if it is just eating ice cream to celebrate, it helps a lot.
9. Always be super grateful to everyone that helps you. Sometimes the help they give you is not exactly what you needed, but even if it isn't, be grateful that they even wanted to help! For example, sometimes people would donate random stuff to our project that had nothing to do with our project, but we would take it and just say, "Thank You" because we saw that they were trying to do their best. Or another example is when my best friend would help decorate cupcakes even though we both wanted to do something else. I was always super grateful, because he could have been doing a bunch of other stuff instead of helping me!
10. Ignore the haters. There weren't many, but some people would tell us they didn't think it was going to happen. Most of the time people were super encouraging, but if you find someone that is a hater, just ignore them and keep going. You know why you are doing what you are doing and don't let anyone discourage you. Even if you don't make your goal, at least you tried and that is what matters!
Another thing is that we had to learn to not be perfectionists. One time when we were making a wedding cake for a teacher, we didn't put in the dowel supports so it started to cave in. This was so discouraging because we had been working on the cake for the whole day and had worked on it for about 5 hours the day before. My mom went to get more cake mix because we thought we were going to have to cut the bottom layer off the cake and start over. We had prayed over that cake about 4 times, and it seemed so discouraging. While my mom was gone to get the strawberry cake mix, she called her friend that used to make cakes for a living. Her friend told us how to save the cake and fix it! When my mom got back we did every step her friend had told us to do, and it did work! When we were putting the top two layers back onto the bottom layer though, one of us stuck their thumb into the middle layer so the cake now had a belly-button! We couldn't fix it because we had already put the lace stenciling on the cake. By that time we were so done we just didn't want to start over, plus my mom was determined that we could not spend more money to make it perfect so we had to just own up to the mistake and we sent a picture of it to the teacher we were making the cake for. She was super nice and she put the flowers right in that spot so no one knew about the belly-button but we learned a lot from that cake!
Selfies with a chick fil a cow are a lot harder to get than you would think!
Our sweet friend, Robin, planned and put on a fundraising Bazaar for us. This was planned way before we had all the donations. In fact, we were only at about $20,000 when she started to plan it! Once we were given the anonymous donation which completed our fundraising, we decided to make it a PARTY and a Bazaar! In all, the Bazaar brought us to about $546 over our goal! There were some really fun aspects of this bazaar! First of all, the Chick fil a Cow came and was even more fun than we imagined he would be!
The organ was a huge hit with Livvy and everyone that heard it
Livvy and the cow had a lot of fun sneaking around the church together
Does anyone remember how Livvy really felt like God wanted her to talk to Phil Wickham about our project back when we started it? Well if you don't, here is her letter that she had written him and if you remember, we tried EVERYTHING we could think of to get it to him!
We started praying about how to get it to him around Christmas of last year. We didn't pray about that every day, but every little while we would ask the Lord how could we figure out how to get it to him? Well, our friend, Denise Witt, who owns Big Idea Media Group knows someone at WJIE radio station. Denise wrote them an email to ask if they knew how we could get it to Phil, and guess what? They were actually at that time, planning to have him come here for a concert! The concert was October 17, 2014 and they gave us FRONT ROW TICKETS!! Livvy has known about this since August and has been so excited! In fact, she could hardly go to sleep the night before the concert! We didn't know if she would get to meet him until the day of the concert and when she found out she was going to get to meet him, she could hardly contain herself! Here she is meeting him...
When Livvy saw Phil Wickham coming toward her she kept saying, "oh my goodness, OH MY GOODNESS"! She was so happy!
Us with Phil Wickham
It was actually a great feeling for her to be able to give him her letter and to say, "Our project is ALL DONE!!" He was super nice and he said this was an encouraging story to him. He seems to have had a hard year last year. We learned that he had to have surgery on his vocal cords so that took a lot of faith to believe God was going to heal him! He sounded GREAT during the concert! We think this was a blessing just for Livvy from God! Here are videos of Livvy's two favorite songs. It was pretty cool...he played both of them back to back at the end of the concert. Liv couldn't stop smiling! The first one is of him singing Beautiful. That is what she talked about in her letter. The Second one is her other favorite...The is Amazing Grace.
Livvy & I were the main speakers at the press conference. We thanked everyone that helped us!
October 16, 2014 was a super fun day! The Muhammad Ali Center invited us to have a press conference at the Ali Center to announce that we had hit our goal to raise the money we needed to build or upgrade the hospital in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since it happened because of the generous donation from someone that heard us speak at the Humanitarian Awards at the Ali Center on September 27, 2014, they wanted to help us announce it - which was so super kind of them! We got to invite anyone we wanted to so of course, we invited the children that had helped us!
Chef Dodd from Sullivan came and spoke at the Press Conference
The Ali Center helped us to invite people like Chef Dodd from Sullivan and Denise Witt from Big Idea Media Group. The amazing thing is that four tv news channels came! I am going to include two of the channels here so you can see what they said about the conference. Here is the one that WHAS 11 put up. WDRB also put up the story on their webpage.
Livvy did a great job speaking! This is something neither of us loves but God sure has given us a lot of it to do for Him!
We made cake to eat to celebrate after the press conference
What we loved the most is that we got to invite the children that helped us. Some of them couldn't make it but Efrata, Katie, Blaise and his sisters Lyric and Kayia, Mia and Dr. Stucker's little girl were all there with us. My best friend, Isaac came and it felt like a party at the Ali Center! We made cake (of course) to eat afterwards. The Ali Center put it up on their webpage and we were so happy because not only are we done, we got to give God all the glory for this once again! It is really such a great feeling when you have done the thing that you knew God wanted you to do and you actually saw that HE IS THE ONE THAT DID IT! I can't really explain how happy this makes me and Livvy!
The quote says: "I always felt like I was born to do something for my people...some people have special resources inside, and when God blesses you to have more than others, you have a responsibility to use it right." Livvy & I agree!
