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Since it’s beginning one of the main goals of our club has been to raise funds to support both the Rotary Foundation, Rotary International projects and also our local club projects. The types of projects have changed over the years as the interests, technology and abilities of our club have changed. Personal contributions were and still do make up a significant portion of the funds raised. Rotary Foundation fundraising has always been important to our club as the Rotary funds are then used to support many projects through matching grants that come back to the local clubs. The Rotary Paul Harris Award is given to any Rotarian or non Rotarian who donates more than one thousand US dollars to the Rotary Foundation or the Polio Plus project, and many, many of our club members have won multiple Paul Harris Awards. In the banner fundraising year of 2020-2021, with a club membership of just under fifty members, our Foundation Chairperson for that year, Bob Sandercock, told us that our club had a total of twenty-five Paul Harris awards to give out along with three major donor awards. All together our club had raised almost thirty thousand dollars for the Rotary Foundation that year with seventy six percent of club members donating. Our club had also passed the mark of raising more than half a million dollars since our inception in 1974. Since 1985, when Rotary launched it’s Polio Plus Campaign, our club has been involved with fundraising efforts to support this. We have sponsored many different types of fundraisers in support of Polio Plus. Many of these have been social occasions such as pub nights or comedy entertainment nights where a portion or all of the funds raised go towards Polio Plus. Our most widely known Polio Plus fundraiser took place in the spring of 2000 when one of our club members, Orville Sleen, along with his friend and fellow Rotarian, Ken Haverland, rode their bicycles over ten thousand kilometers across Canada to raise funds for Polio Plus. Some of the early projects involved selling such things as pre-purchased entertainment coupon books and Rotary cookbooks, where the profit from sales was retained by the club and used to fund our charitable projects. The Rotary Cookbooks were a Alberta District project in 1987 to raise funds for Polio Plus. The project was spearheaded by Vermeil Martin, wife of District 536 Governor Doug Martin. Rotary ladies around Alberta sent in their best recipes, they were then tested and the best ones were selected for the cookbook. Boxes of the published books were then sent to the Rotary Clubs around Alberta for sale. This was a banner fundraiser as it raised over one million dollars for Polio Plus. Charity Auctions were also a popular way to raise funds with donated items sold to the highest bidder. These funds could be used for projects outside Alberta. More recently our club has provided transportation at local music festivals in return for a donation to our club. We have also been involved with charity fundraisers regulated by the Alberta Gaming Commission such as sales of K Days Raffle tickets, working Bingos and Casinos. Funds from these are restricted for use in Alberta. For many years, our Rotary Wheel of Fortune has been a major source of fun at our meetings and also a fundraiser for our charity projects, where meeting attendees could purchase tickets and then turn the wheel, if their number was pulled, to see if they would win a small donated prize. We no longer sell tickets for this as the accounting required is not worth the amount raised each week however we still use the Wheel of Fortune as a source of fun for our meetings by selecting members or guests for sometimes goofy reasons to turn the wheel for chance to win a small donated prize. Our club Sergeant at Arms has also been a big source of fun and fundraising by using their talents to come up with all kinds of goofy reasons to fine small amounts to club members at meetings. Almost anything is fair game, bad hair, cuteness taxes, having your phone ring during a meeting, singing off tune, not being able to answer goofy quiz questions, and many more. We then pass the pot for members to pay their fines or to donate ‘happy bucks’ if they wish to announce occasions, big and small, that have made them happy. Ron McCullough spinning the wheel with Ken Germain In 1990, the members of our club decided to sponsor a Paul Harris Portrait Project, in which a well known local artist and member of our club, Bill Skelly, donated his talents and time to produce a portrait of Paul Harris. It was then sold as lithographic prints at various Rotary functions, conferences and conventions, to raise funds for our club. In the more recent past, at the suggestion of one of our members Patrick Gibson, we have also made use of the internet for fundraising purposes by getting together with Raffle Box and using their website to help to raise funds for Little Warriors, Meals on Wheels, Dogs with Wings, the Edmonton Food Bank and Wounded Warriors. Over the years our flagship fundraiser (please forgive the pun) for non-restricted funds has been our Flag Program, which was brought to our club by Bruce Flesher in 2008. It involves a lot of volunteer effort, but each year since then, this program has raised fifteen to twenty thousand dollars for our club. |
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