A year and three months after I started fundraising, I can finally announce that……I’M FULLY FUNDED!!!! In celebration of this I wanted to talk about some of my fundraising stories, the good ones and bad ones. Any future racers or people attempting the major challenge of fundraising, I hope this can be encouraging for you. Fundraising was specifically extremely difficult and quite frankly was impossible for me, good thing we serve a God who makes the impossible very possible.
About a month into fundraising things were going very very slow and I was discouraged. But one day I randomly checked my account and I had a $500 monthly anonymous donation, a $1,000 single donation and a $450 donation. I screamed and ran upstairs to my parents and then we screamed together. I texted in our new World Race group chat about how cool it is that random strangers donated so much. I was so excited and started to see where the money was going to come from. A couple days later, I checked my account and all the donations disappeared. I quickly contacted the person who was overshadowing fundraising to figure out what happened. Turns out there is another Samantha Barnhart on the 11n11 world race trip and those were her donations but accidentally got placed into my account. Ouch, that one hurt.
One special thing about my race is I have gotten to experience this side by side with one of my bestfriends from home, Maggie. Maggie and I are on the same squad and both had the same challenge of raising this money. Unlike most people fundraising, we shared the same audience, which we quickly learned was a challenge. We had to be careful to be strategic about when we both did fundraisers, that we wouldn’t do it at the same time. Comparison was another battle I had to face through that. Hey Mags if you are reading this, I love ya.
I wrote a total of 35 letters to different churches asking for any type of support, not a single response to this day. I would love to get the hours I put into those letters back. I set up a few meetings with a few different churches and talked to the pastors for hours about my testimony asking for support. I still had no luck.
All of this was a really humbling process. A lot of It made me rethink whether or not I was supposed to be in the race many times. Things did not seem possible. I remember sitting in a church group just crying about how bad I wanted to go and how I didn’t think the money would come in. A year later here I am, on the way to my last country. Now let me tell you the miracles Abba pulled out on me.
One of my favorite stories to tell is this one. I had the opportunity to speak in front of my childhood church staff during their staff meeting before launch. Originally I was there to talk about the race, but I ended up just telling my testimony. I stood in front of all of those people and just poured my story out, not really knowing why I was. When I was finished I sat down and waited for the meeting to be over. They dismissed the meeting and a woman came up to me with blood shot eyes, you could tell she had been crying. She looked at me and said “If you don’t get anything out of today, I want you to know that you just gave me so much hope”. She told me about someone in her life that is in the same spot I used to be and how she has felt hopeless, but hearing my story reminded her how powerful Abba is. She hugged me, cried and thanked me. Wow, that was a very fulfilling moment. I ended up getting quite a few donations from that day.
Flash forward to about 2 months ago, I woke up and immediately just had the greatest urge to pray for a $1,000 donation by midnight. I was pumped and asked all the girls who also lived in my room to pray with me. We all laughed and prayed together, half joking but half so serious. All day I checked my gmail to see if anyone had donated. All. Day. Refresh after refresh. Midnight came and I didn’t get a donation. I wasn’t too disappointed because it just seemed so extreme. A couple weeks later I randomly checked my account and there was a $1,000 anonymous donation on the exact date I prayed for the donation. I just didn’t get an email because when people give out anonymous donations they don’t email you. Completely crazy.
A couple of weeks ago I was still $4,000 from being fully funded, it all came in at once and from the least expected people. If fundraising has taught me anything, it has taught me not to question where money is going to come from because the Lord works in crazy ways.
Fundraising tips I have for future racers:
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Always always always start with prayer and ask for prayer, you will not raise this money if the Lord isn’t the center of it.
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Have patience and be confident that God is good and will provide.
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Don’t let yourself or others make you feel like you aren’t doing enough, work off of the Lord’s strength, not your own.
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The worst that can happen is someone saying no, remember that.
I also wanted to thank everyone from the absolute bottom of my heart for getting me here, I genuinely couldn’t have done this without you. Thank you for having faith in me and most importantly the Lord. In less than 3 months this journey will be over and I genuinely know I will be coming home a new person. I used to be scared of that but now i’m just thankful for the change.
Travel update- We just left Asia a few days ago, we are almost to Nicaragua. Our last stop!!!!!!! We had our last long bus ride and last long flight of the race what!!! Also we got to have a layover in Russia (where I am actually writing this right now) and Miami!!
Love, Samantha
