Mutant Toy Stall

In a Mutant Toy Stall, your ‘land of broken dreams’ can become the ‘land of amazing opportunities’! In other words, you can take broken toys and give them new life! All you need is lots of toy bits, an arsenal of hot glue guns and an army of parents to supervise 🙂

Get your families to hunt and gather all of their broken and unloved toys. The more notice, the better. You can ask far and wide because most families (apart from those pesky minimalist types) will have squoodles of toys that deserve to be taken to the tip and will LOVE to feel great about making a positive contribution with them.

In preparation for the toy stall, set up tubs and my kids over to ‘deconstruct’ the toys you have collected. I can assure you they are VERY good at it! You can use your own kids though, plus I suspect that you’d get a line up of dads who would fall over themselves to be the hero of this task.

Set up tables and chairs, or even picnic blankets would do. This could be an outdoor activity set up under a marquee, or a great use of indoor space.

Charge whatever you like to participate. Don’t make it too cheap because it will end up being quite labour intensive. You could charge per piece, for example 5 pieces for $3, 10 pieces for $5 and 20 pieces for $8. Or you could charge per ‘base’ piece which could include 5 ‘add-on’ bits. Or charge on a time basis – $5 for 15 minutes to make as much as you want.

An alternative or extension to this idea is to have all sorts of bits and pieces like bolts and machine parts to make wild and wonderful machines.

Yet another idea is to prepare mini kits in zip lock bags, so they can do it as a takeaway activity, and throw in a stick of blue tack or blob of playdough.

So many ways it can be run – if you do one, I’d love it if you could send in your photos and let us know how it went 🙂

Happy Fundraising!

Mandy Weidmann aka the Fundraising Whisperer