Here is a short list of some simple fundraising ideas for Birth Networks.

• Open a boutique in your home or in a mother/baby-friendly location (such as a birth center or lactation support center) and sell donated maternity and baby clothes.
• Organize a Womanless Beauty Pageant – husbands or boyfriends dress up as their pregnant wives for a beauty pageant.  Donations come from ticket sales, food contributions, best costume, and raffle tickets for items contributed by local businesses.
• Hold a craft fair or garage sale.
• Host a Karaoke night.  Charge $5 for admission and have a competition for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th places.  After all performances are completed, winners will be determined through an auction and awarded prizes solicited from local businesses and organizations.  Further Karaoke nights can be planned with winners competing.  Have snacks donated and if possible, find someone willing to let you use their machine and songs.
• Sell raffle tickets for a Spa Day or “Pamper Me” baskets.
• Sponsor a miniature golf tournament.
• Develop and sell a cookbook through Morris Press
• Create custom calendars with inspiring photos of pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and healthy parenting with advertising sold to local mom-baby-friendly businesses.
• Have a blind auction, silent auction, or dinner auction.
• Sponsor a favorite photo competition. Photos can be baby photos or pregnant mom photos, etc. Specify the maximum size acceptable and have applicants submit a card with a few sentences as a description.  Photos are mounted on a display board in your community such as a local baby store or in a sponsoring merchant’s window, during a sidewalk festival, baby show - whatever will draw the most people and particularly families of the participants.  Each photo is numbered and a jar is numbered for each photo. Votes are in the form of coins, bills, or checks made payable to your organization.  A prize will go the best photo’s owner – solicit your prizes from businesses or organizations and put the winning picture in your local newspaper if it is not cost-prohibitive.
• Have a Guessing Game. Participants are given the opportunity to guess something and they pay for each guess, how many M&M’s in a jar with seasonal candy at each meeting, or guesses related to events such as birth delivery dates, weight and length of baby, etc.
• Make corsages for a special event such as Mother's Day. Take orders ahead of time and collect the payment in advance. 
• Sell T-shirts and infant apparel with your Birth Network’s name.  See www.cafepress.com
• Have a potluck dinner with a donation basket.
• Hold a movie night.

Did you have a successful fundraiser that you would like to add to this list?  Send your idea to editor@lamaze.org.