"I'm walking on sunshine..ohhh." Santana sang as she drove Rachel and herself through the streets of St. Lawrence. Rachel glanced over from the passenger seat smiling. It was finally Friday. Santana felt like she had been waiting weeks upon weeks for this meeting. She was more happy than ever after a lovely session with her therapist the day before. Santana knew as soon as she woke up this morning that today was going to be a good day. Everything seemed to be a little bit brighter and nothing was going to wipe the grin off of Santana's face.
"After today we will be one step closer to being able to visit the children's home anytime we want." Rachel sing songed.
Santana stopped singing abruptly like she had just had a revelation. "You're right!" Her excited smiled faded slightly. "But, it's still going to be a couple of weeks, they have to do background checks and we have to set up doctors appointments for lab screenings and take a drug test."
"Are we the only two volunteering?" Rachel wondered out loud.
"I think almost everyone is going to sign up so they can volunteer when they can after we finish the rooms." Santana replied as she turned on her turn signal to pull into the lawyers office building.
Santana and Rachel were two of the first few people to make their way into the very large conference room. Santana was in awe, she had never seen an official room this huge before. The hard wood table looked as if it stretched for miles and it was surrounded by large leather chairs. Mrs. Stidham and Chloe were already seated at one end with their lawyers, Tina sat next to them while Puck and Quinn sat opposite across the table. Rachel and Santana decided to sit next to Puck and Quinn as they waited for everyone else to arrive.
As more people began to trickle in, Santana smiled and greeted them with a casual hello. This was perfect, everyone on the list had showed up. It meant more to Santana than they would ever know. The fact that all of these people willingly agreed to help was amazing to her. None of them were bad people but it was always inspiring to see so many people come together for a special cause.
"Santana would you like to say anything before we begin?" Mrs. Stidham asked with a quiet and kind smile.
"What? Me? Say something?" Santana sputtered out, she hadn't been prepared.
"Of course. We wouldn't all be here if it wasn't for you." When Agetha had gotten the call about the list of people that Santana had gathered, all she could do was cry. She never imagined that someone would go this above and beyond for the children's home. Santana and everyone in the room were truly blessings in disguise.
"Okay..um..where do I start? I guess first I want to thank you all for helping with this." Santana made sure to look at everyone and jeez there were a lot of people here. "When I was first presented this project, I thought I was just going to be doing some art pieces to be showed in a production or two. I'm normally not the kind of person who dives into things, but I jumped head first into this. I felt such a strong pull to this project and just so you know Mrs. Stidham we are going to do an art showing every year from here on out."
"Please call me Agetha." Mrs. Stidham waved a hand at Santana's use of formalities.
"Agetha." Santana bowed slightly from her standing position in front of her seat at the table. "I knew I wanted to do everything in my power to help not only The St. Lawrence Children's Home, but others as well. I've never been in the system and I can only imagine how not fun it is. I know that decorating rooms isn't going to make all their problems go away, but with our help that saved money can go to getting the proper care and every day items for all the children. It all eventually comes full circle and we get to start that circle today." Santana sat back down as everyone applauded. Rachel was of course crying happy tears, it moved her to see Santana speak so passionately.
"Are we ready to get started?" Agetha asked as she stood up, taking a stack of papers from Chloe's hands. "I figure we should get the legality part of this covered and then we can discuss any ideas you all might have? These are over views of the royalties and residuals you can receive for being a part of the film."
"Mrs. Stidham. No disrespect intended ma'm but I don't think any of us intend to collect any form of compensation for this. I personally think gratitude and honest appreciation is enough." Blaine spoke from his seat at the end of the table next to Kurt.
"Blaine's right, we knew there was an option to collect monetary compensation but we want that money put back into the home for the kids." Puck looked to his left at the lawyers. "Do you guys already have a contract made up that says we don't want royalties or anything, just the use of our name for production credits and singular advertisement purposes?"
One of the lawyers whom Santana still insisted on calling Bob nodded his head. "We had one drawn up per request from Mrs. Lopez after our first meeting, we just didn't wan to assume."
Santana gave her signature smirk. "I told you I knew my people. We're a large group of friends, well no. I take that back, we're more like a large family, it happens when you live in a small town like McKinley." Agetha began to collect all the previous pieces of paper that she handed out as Chloe walked along behind her handing out the new contracts.
"I have a question as to what production credits and singular advertisement purposes are?" Mr. Shue raised his hand a little shyly. Almost everyone in the room knew at least a little bit about this type of business except for him and Ms. Pillbury.
"It just means that they will put your name or your company name in the credits and that your name can be used for advertisement for this project only. Like if they done another documentary in a few years they couldn't use our names in the advertisements again unless we sign new contracts." Finn answered to everyone's surprise. He chuckled, "Don't look at me like that. I know movies, I do own a theater you know." He grinned when everyone laughed.
"I know you all are very professional business people, but I am the lawyer here for all of us. If anyone has anymore questions about the contract please do ask because we don't want anyone tricked into anything here. Fine lines and all that jazz." Tina spoke as her eyes scanned the pages of the new contract. "It's nothing personal." Tina looked at the two lawyers that were present for Agetha and Chloe. "You two are lawyers yourselves, you know how this works."
"We understand. It's straight forward business." Bob agreed.
Rachel read through her contract as did everyone else waiting for Tina to give them okay to sign. As far as she could tell there wasn't really anything out of the ordinary in the contract. They had extended the no outside media clause to cover everyone, not just Santana. There was a portion that covered the topic of no royalties or residuals due during pre and post production. The last part of the contract covered the donation services for the unspecified number of rooms.
"Does this last part mean we get to pick how many rooms we can decorate?" Ryder asked.
"Yes, you can do one or you can do ten. It's up to you." Agetha said as she sat back down in her chair.
"How many buildings and rooms are there on the campus?" Sam asked as he flipped his pen back and forth between his fingers.
"Well it's a five building campus. We have the main office building, the lessons building that contains the classrooms, library, computer lab, and cafeteria." Agetha was going through the whole campus layout in her head. "We have a staff housing building, an athletic building that contains the pool, basketball court, and gym and last is the children's housing which is the dorm rooms. The dorm housing has one hundred sixty rooms total at the moment, that includes lounge areas and bathrooms." Agetha looked at all the stunned faces around the room. "That number will decrease after renovations. We're combining two dorms in the middle and at each end of the hallway to create three suites for floor monitors to stay in. The first floor will house newborns to twelve year old's. The second floor is the boys and the top floor is the girls all thirteen to eighteen. At the end of renovations we will have forty-four dorm rooms total for the teenagers on the second and third floor. The bottom floor is being completely converted into a nursery and six different age group rooms."
Santana quietly did the math in her head, subtracting all the rooms that were going to be renovated. "That's only ninety five actual dorm rooms in total. Is that enough?" Santana asked as she frowned.
"The building is huge, every room is a double and they are about two hundred fifty square feet each. They were really generous when they built this campus. We estimate we will be able to house about two hundred eighty kids. That's five times as many kids as we have now. Even after the other two homes combine with ours, we will still have enough space for about one hundred kids. That space won't last long though, sadly it fills up pretty quickly." Chloe finished in a sad tone.
"Welp." Cassie clasped her hands together with an excited grin. "I have confidence that we can decorate all the rooms. I mean there is twenty one of us, we got this covered Mrs. Stidham."
"I don't see anything that's underhanded or not legit in the contract. So, let's finalize this shall we if you all are good and then we can discuss room details." Tina nodded her head at everyone. They all already had their pens out, eager to sign and get the process underway.
"What kind of room details are we talking about here?" Leroy asked as he signed his contract and laid down his pen.
"Well. You don't have to buy beds, desks or wardrobe cubicles all the big furniture is already there. When they closed the school they literally walked out and left everything after the students moved out. Anything missing on the second and third floor can be replaced with a piece from the first floor that's taken out of the rooms being turned into the nursery. We want to keep all that the same so that they won't fight over who has cooler furniture. We have several cribs and toddler beds already, we won't need any new ones with the other two homes bringing theirs with them. Basically all big furniture is taken care of."
"So we get to do painting, bedding, wall art, all the stuff like that. I'm okay with that." Shelby nodded her head as she spoke.
"With all the money we save not having to buy big furniture, we can help provide other stuff. Oh we could do shower baskets for them! Get extra towels and linens. Help get them school supplies, clothes and shoes." Rachel started rattle off everything they could do.
"Game systems and TVs for the lounge rooms." Sam and Mike spoke at the same time. They laughed before cheesily high fiving. Kurt shook his head and rolled his eyes. Ugh. Boys.
"No no no, think practical stuff guys. Things that they need." Quinn shouted as the room slowly delved into a mess of loud murmurs and collective thinking out loud.
Santana sat back with wide eyes. These people were crazy, it wouldn't surprise her one bit if someone started throwing punches over which game system was better. Of course she was already thinking about what extra stuff she and Rachel could put their money to, she just wasn't shouting about it like everyone else.
"The babies will need diapers and the toddlers will need pull ups and potties." Marley was now swooning about all the stuff that she and Rachel could get for the little ones. Santana was just about to tell everyone to shut up when she heard a sniffle. Someone was crying. Looking around the table Santana noticed that Agetha had her head buried in her hands.
"Guys!" Santana waited for everyone to quiet down before she addressed Mrs. Stidham. "Are you okay Agetha?" Santana asked with concern as she walked around the table to squat down on the balls of her feet next to the woman's chair.
"Oh honey. I'm fine. It's just...we've never worked with a group of people who were this enthusiastic about helping. Your generosity is too kind." Agetha sniffed again as she wiped her eyes with some tissue that Chloe had ran out to get. "I'm not going to tell you all how to spend your money, but we have certain things provided for us. All textbooks the children may need if they have to miss regular school are government funded through the school systems. We can never have too many reading books though. We have a very decent food budget and some of the best cooks who provide healthy but very delicious and filling meals."
"We understand that you need help in more areas than others, but we just want to make sure that all areas are covered. No stone left un-turned so to speak." Santana smiled as Agetha's tears subsided. This woman was about to get the biggest faith in humanity restored moment of her life. She truly had no idea just how much power this group of people from McKinley had.
