236 of our closest friends helped the Mount Prospect - Prospect Heights Rotary Club raise over $14,000 on February 6, 2019! Congratulations to these seven lucky folks!
The weather mostly cooperated and our friends, family and colleagues turned out en masse to buy bingo cards, raffle tickets, heads/tails paddles and so much more for a good cause.
All told, our club raised over $14,000 for our charitable foundation. The money is used to to support local charities, fund college and vocational scholarships, provide new winter coats to children, and much more.
The Classic is not a traditional fundraising dinner. There is so much more involved! A perfect mid-week night out, a $100 ticket includes dinner for two with an open bar. We get things started promptly at 5:30 and wrap up at 9:30 so everyone can get a good night's rest before work the next day. The ticket is also entry into our reverse raffle - whose grand prize is $5,000!
But, as Tom Petty so eloquently put it - Even the losers get lucky sometime. As non-winning tickets get pulled, they go into the consolation hopper. Every 10 tickets called, someone wins a consolation prize worth at least $100. The prizes are donations from local businesses and institutions and show how much they support the work our Club does.
We also play Bingo - as each number is called, players check to see if their bingo card had that number. The first person to cover their entire card wins! Well, actually, the first SIX people to cover their cards wins!
(We like giving prizes out)
We played Head & Tails which is what you think it is. People bought paddles - Heads on one side, Tails on the other. They hold up their choice and a coin is flipped. If they match the coin, they remain standing. If not, they sit down. The last one standing wins half the pot.
And then there's the raffles. Boy-oh-boy do we have raffles! We raffled off Cubs tickets. We had the Required By Rotary Split the Pot raffle. And we had our newest, and perhaps our most successful raffle - the Table of Cheer. Everyone in the club brought in a bottle of their favorite spirit and the whole kit and kaboodle was raffled off.
All told, about 40 people come away with some sort of prize that matched or exceeded the cost of their ticket. That's almost 20% of all tickets sold!
We hope to see everyone back next year!