It’s Official! Chris’s Drive For Independence Has Reached its Goal!

Thank you to everyone who made our very first car show a success! We may not have reached our goal but we are less than $1,000.00 away from our goal! We are still proceeding forward with getting Chris’s truck. It will still be a couple months until we are given the go ahead to get the truck by OVR so there is still an opportunity to get there.

Thank you to the food trucks and vendors who gave their support in our first year. You took a gamble on us! We can’t say thank you enough for being there to support us! Thank you to the vendors who came out to share the day with us. Thank you to all the car guys, including some of the Visual Reality Car Club, and three special Johns (John O., John Sheldon, and John Burch) that came out to support! Chris This event was about bringing the community out to help one of its own reach his dream!

The Upshift Summer Bash raised $1,209.00 leaving us just $800.00 shy of our goal. We thought we were proceeding forward without reaching it. That all changed this morning at 9:30am! I was expecting email from Ride-Away who was part of our event. Imagine my (Heather’s) surprise when I looked in my email and there was a donation the completed our goal and exceeded it! I just about hit the floor I was so shocked! Chris was sleeping and I woke him up with my hysterics! At least it was a great reason, right?

Thank you again to everyone who has helped us reach our goal! It was so much a community effort! It now puts us very close to Chris’s Dream of Driving. OVR paperwork is in the works and hopefully as long as all goes to plan we will have his truck in 4-6 months! Sooner is better than later but after a 10 year wait this will be nothing! What a way to celebrate Chris and I being together for 10 years! What an awesome gift and one we will never forget!!!

Upshift Summer Bash Press Release

PRESS RELEASE

*For Immediate Release*

Bring you cars! Bring your family! And don’t forget to come hungry! We are thrilled to announce our first annual Drive For Independence Upshift Summer Bash. This year’s event will be held at Leg Up Farm, 4880 N Sherman Street Ext, Mt Wolf, PA 17347, on Saturday August 16 from 10am-4pm. It is a car show, food truck and vendor event. There will be plenty of beautiful cars, several food trucks to tempt your taste buds, plenty of vendors to pique your interest, and DJ-T1 to keep the party going. The Upshift Summer Bash is a  fundraiser for Chris Sauerbaum and his need for a wheelchair accessible vehicle. He has had his driver’s license for 10 years now without a vehicle to drive. We are working towards a $10,000.00 down payment on a Mobility SVM Chevrolet Silverado. We are currently at $8,000.00 and hope to reach our goal with the Upshift Summer Bash.  Ride-Away Wheelchair Vehicles will be bringing a Mobility SVM vehicle to showcase what we are fundraising for.

Did someone mention food trucks?! Of course we did! We will have Bountiful Feast, Scoops Ice Cream and Grille, Smoothie King York, PA, Spectrum Farm to Truck, and Sophie’s Italian Ice to fill your bellies and cool you down. We also have vendors for all your shopping needs! Favorite direct sales companies and home crafters will be on hand to satisfy your shopping fun. The car show can accommodate up to 100 vehicles in the car show field. Cars, trucks and motor cycles are welcome. Pre-register your vehicle by visiting: https://driveforindependence.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/upshift-summer-bash-car-show-registration/. Pre-registration is only $10.00 while the day of the show registration is $15.00.  We will have 1st-3rd custom trophies designed by Chris Sauerbaum, himself, for the show field that will be judged by your fellow car show participants. There will also be a People’s Choice voted on by the general public. Chris is definitely showcasing his graphic design abilities with this show. There will also be an event photographer on hand and you will be able to get a photo of your car at the event. Donations from photos will go to YAFCA,  a local community organization (www.facebook.com/YAFCA.org). We will also have a silent auctions with items up for bid such as A York Revolution Prize pack that contains 4 ticket vouchers, SnS Croftgate car care items, $100 in free Web design, and massage gift certificates and many more! We will also have activities for the kids including the large barrier-free playground!

We hope to bring you this event bigger and better in the future as we turn our efforts to begin our 501(c) charity efforts with Drive For Independence. We would like to take everything we have learned fundraising for Christopher Sauerbaum’s Wheelchair accessible truck and help others in a similar situation needing accessible transportation for work. For more information please see http://www.driveforindependence.wordpress.com or our Drive for Independence Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/driveforindependence. To donate please see http://www.gofundme.com/driveforindependence. We can be reached at driveforindependence@gmail.com.

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Upshift Summer Bash Car Show Registration

Here is the registration for the Upshift Summer Bash Car Show.
It’s open to anything and is a more casual meet type show. Bikes are welcome. Join the Facebook event here: Upshift Summer Bash Facebook Event

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To relieve any confusion with pre-registration, you must go through all the steps to checkout. When you get to the shipping and billing information there is a spot on the right hand side that asks for the  $5.00 off code. Click on it and enter the code below for the discount.

$5.00 off Pre-registration promo code: UPSBH2014
Register Here – Upshift Summer Bash Registration

Mail-In Registration Form
*Discount code cannot be used with the mail-in registration.

Vendor Registration

Fill out the form below to receive a vendor contract (PDF) via email.

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Car and Vendor registration for Upshift Summer Bash is now open!

Our Upshift Summer Bash is scheduled for Saturday, August 16, 2014 from 10am-4pm. We are looking for vendors and car show participants. Our goal with this show is to reach our $10,000.00 down payment goal towards Chris Sauerbaum’s Mobility SVM Chevrolet Silverado. We are hoping to raise $3,000.00 with this event. Anything above and beyond our goal will go to help offset the cost of the vehicle which is approximately $50,000.00. We would like to  make this an annual fundraiser with Drive For Independence when we start our 501(c) to help other people reach their goal of driving.

We are looking for 40 vendors of all varieties, including direct sales, crafts, and car related products. The price per spot is $35.00  or $25.00 plus a silent auction item worth at least $15.00. Set up for vendors will begin at 8:00am.

We are also looking for those interested in being in our car show field. Registration is $10.00 per vehicle to pre-register up until August 9th. We are able to accommodate 100 vehicles. If there is room open the day of the show registration is $15.00. There will be trophies for 1st-3rd judged and a people’s choice. Roll-in will be at 9:00am.

We will be taking vendor payments and car show payments via cash, check, or PayPal. Please contact us for PayPal instructions.

For an application please contact us at http://www.facebook.com/driveforindependence or driveforindependence@gmail.com.

Chris and Heather testing out the 2014 Mobility SVM Silverado at the New York Metro Abilities Expo in May.

Winterfest

We had a great day at Winterfest! Thank you for allowing us to participate Eastern York Middle School PTSO!

The boys’ handprint Santas were a hit! All 10 sold out by noon! We were selling them at $3.00 a piece. One last ended up donating $10.00 for one so altogether the boys brought in $37.00 for Daddy’s truck! Could not be happier that our boys are learning what it means to help and work towards a family goal! They get so excited when talking about “Drive For Independence”.

The total for the day was $113.00 which was excellent for us! We are looking forward to possibly doing it next year if we get ” Drive For Independence” going as the charity!
It was great meeting people and sharing our story! I know many who did donate probably won’t see this but we cannot thank them enough for their kindness and generosity. We weren’t even asking for “donations” yesterday and some out of the kindness of their hearts did!

Thank you to Chris’ mom for allowing us to sell candles, melts and ornaments as well! It really helped!

Great day, great people! Couldn’t ask for anything more!

Holiday Bazaar Wrap-Up

The Drive For Independence Holiday Bazaar was HUGE success! For our first big event it went better than expected. Other than a scheduling mix-up with Ride-Away and the Mobility SVM truck and a no-show clown things went very well. We are so grateful to the vendors who took their time to join us! Without them there wouldn’t have been a show! We also would like to thank the friends family and community who showed us a tremendous amount of support!

We had several items donated by vendors for our silent auction as well as a few outside gifts as well.  There were a lot of great gifts to choose from and the total for the auction alone was amazing! The silent auction brought in $205!

That is just a small part of all of the donations brought in that day! One of the things that drew the most attention was the American Flag afghan made by Cindy Russell, my (Heather’s) mom.  Walking in the door you received a free ticket and you could either put it in the bucket to win a cookbook or the afghan. We also were selling tickets to increase your chance of winning. I didn’t get an exact total on that but I know it brought in quite a bit of the donations that day. Marisa Blough’s name was chosen as the winner. The cookbook was won by Burnell Kerr but she chose to donate the book back to us!

Several of the vendors also made donations based on their sales and it helped quite a bit! Now what everyone has been waiting for: The BIG total! With vendor fees and silent auction included and a few expenses here and there the grand total is $1,150.00! We cannot say thank you enough!  It is amazing what a small community can do on a Sunday afternoon! None of you had to help us but out of the kindness of your hearts you did and we are extremely Grateful! What a way to celebrate Thanksgiving! We definitely have A LOT to be Thankful for this year! With much Love and Appreciation Chris, Heather, Harley and Tucker!

We look forward to a spring show! Stayed tune for more details as they become available!

Gardening With A Purpose Cookbook

We are looking to put together a cookbook with Garden Fresh recipes. We originally were looking for recipes with prep time of less than 30 minutes but decided to open it up to any length of prep. The categories are
Breakfast and smoothies, soups and salads, appetizers and sides, main dishes and desserts. I’m also adding a category of Salsas. I’m getting quite a fresh salsa recipes that they need their space! The goal is to have as much of the dish possible or main ingredients be garden fresh. We are looking for around 50-60 recipes. Submit 3 recipes and be entered to win one when they are completed! We will include your name and if you are a business we will include a short who you are and website information. We would like to set a deadline of Saturday Sept 21. so Chris has time to do layout to save on production costs. I would like to do preorder sales in October and hope to have them for our Nov.10 vendor show.
We are probably looking at $20-$25 for a spiral bound cookbook. We will get a definite price out there once we pick a final printer but our goal right now is to get those recipes!

Recipes can be sent to driveforindependence@gmail.com
Or to our Drive for Independence Facebook inbox.

Can’t wait to see the awesome recipes!