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How it works

What is the best way to start if you want to create a WOW action? What do you need to keep in mind? This is how you plan your own WOW Day action step by step.

Deciding on an activity

There are countless ways to shape your very own WOW-Day. Together as students, teachers and parents you may come up with wonderful ideas of how to raise donations for Waldorf and social institutions worldwide.

Whether your circus performance makes the audience wonder, you support a farmer as a harvester, or you explore your limits during a charity run. You can organise small or big activities for the young and the old. Or maybe you come up with something really crazy? Everything is possible. Most importantly, you should have a lot of fun dedicating a full day towards a good cause. Suggestions for your activities can be found here.

Important questions are:

  • What is a suitable date for your WOW-Day campaign?
  • Which teachers/parents might help you in organizing your fundraising project?
  • Can the student council lend you a helping hand?
  • Do you want to plan something big for the entire school or does each class raise funds independently?
  • How much time do you want to invest and what needs to be organised until that date?
  • Do you want to inform the press and media and gain more visitors?

Participation is open to all students in grades 1 to 13 at Waldorf schools, as well as people who live in social therapy and curative education facilities. To register, please fill in our online application form.

The process

Your WOW-Day took place and was a great success? Great! Now it is time to collect the donations.

Collecting and transferring funds

  • Based on German legislation, we generally ask that WOW-Day funds are first compiled on an official school account and subsequently the total amount is transferred to the Friends of Waldorf Education.
  • Students who work in a company on WOW-Day should ask their employer to transfer wages directly to the account of their school, as specified in the employment contract.
  • We ask the schools to transfer the WOW-Day funds to the Friends of Waldorf Education as soon as possible after the campaign. This is very important, because this is the only way we can forward the donations quickly to the beneficiary projects and make sure that students receive timely feedback from those projects.

Your dedication makes a difference

Letters of thanks

After the completion of the campaign we will send all participants a collection of thank you letters from the projects that were supported by your commitment. We ask you to be patient, because WOW-Day has grown in the past years to an international campaign. As a result, the processing of funds takes a certain time and several steps need to be completed before the projects can thank you and let you know about how they used your money. 

Meanwhile, we look forward to learning about your WOW-Day activities. Write us at wow-day[at]freunde-waldorf.de and tell us about your great ideas and experiences on WOW-Day. We also invite you to send us nice photos, videos or articles in school newspapers, as we would like to share your creative ideas and thus contribute to the world growing a little more together as one.

Did you know that we forward 100% of your donations to the local facilities, that is, without deductions for our administrative budget? This has been one of the principles of our work since the very beginning of the Friends of Waldorf Education. This is especially important for small projects where every Euro counts.

Projects around the world

Institutions that need support, can be found under projects around the world. You can either decide on a specific project that you would like to support or you can donate to the general WOW-Day Fund. The WOW-Day Fund helps to support projects desperate for help and projects that cannot make a major purchase from their own resources, or we can support initiatives that are still fairly unknown and have no one supporting them. If you would like to support a specific institution, you can inform us at any time, even after registration and up to the time until your donation reaches us.

FAQ's

Here you will find frequently asked questions and answers.

Learn more

Ideas for Your Campaign

There are countless ways to shape your own WOW-Day. A collection of colourful ideas can be found here.

Learn more
Empower & donate now
Empower & donate now