How do I help improve my school's FIRST Robotics team?

So... I guess I'm what you'd call the captain of the team, except we don't technically have a captain. Our team is pretty small compared to some of the other ones. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, I think being on a larger team and barely being able to do a thing would be worse...

Except, the 15 or so people we do have show up to meetings and play games on the computer the whole time. I guess I don't blame them, as we (read: I) have had problems laying out what needs to be done so far, even though I was trying to get everyone interested in building a robot in the off-season (not part of the FIRST competition) as some practice and maybe do something that would get people interested in our team.

That or doing something else that is hands-on. Which would probably be the best thing at this point, but there's only one of me, and I can't keep everyone interested at the same time. I'd like to let them start playing with the electronics, but we only have one working set (and even the bigger teams only have like 2 controllers at most, as far as I've gathered) and it is hard to get multiple people involved with that at the same time. What's sad is that most of the people there have good ideas and want to do something, but just don't feel like they can do it by themselves.

The other thing is money (probably the biggest thing). We can barely scrape together the $5,000 per event entry fee each year, and we only end up going to one official, local event, and then go to some wind-down thing which is only about $500. How the hell do some teams end up going to five different events and traveling across the US?

We've tried fundraising and stuff, but that barely gets us the entry fee, and we're doing like 3 or 4 (we have our "pancake breakfast" coming up, but we don't get much of a return from that, and it is our biggest event). The school and the school district doesn't support our team, nor do any of the other teams in the area seem to get school or district funding. The last option is corporate sponsorship, but all of that money seems to be going to teams that are already established and doing well. The last idea I had at this point was making some sort of presentation that we could present in-person to local businesses, but we don't have much to show them to seem interesting. I wish there was more we could do, but it basically boils down to begging people for money. And FIRST Robotics is expensive.

This ended up sounding like a massive whine, but those are the problems (and some background). So, basically, what can I do to help the team, and what can our team do to help itself?