Maintaining sufficient funds is pivotal for any robotics team. While grants and sponsorships do offer a great deal of help with raising funds for a starting team, it is also suggested you do independent fundraisers in order to further aid the team. For example, in order to get to the MAR District Championships this year, our team sold pizza at school to raise more money to cover our funds. We also sold advertisements to local businesses for our school newspaper. While we did also seek sponsorships and grants, the fundraisers provided quite a lot of help regarding costs. It is suggested that you do fundraisers both in season, as well as offseason. Teams should also spend their money wisely, in efforts to assure that they could cover the costs of all the competitions they will be attending, as well as additional costs that may arise such as transportation, hotels, etc. Even if your team is unsure if they will be attending a certain event, it should still be included in the team budget. For example, our team initially did not consider making it to District Championships, and definitely not World Championships as a possibility. In the end, we did end up qualifying to compete in both and were left slightly confused as to what to do next. Eventually, with the help of our district, sponsors, grants, and fundraisers we were able to make it. – Alliyah