Challenge announced for Rotary’s Dozen Dinner Draw

Earlier this month, the Rotary Club of Ithaca announced that it has received a $10,000 challenge grant for its Dozen Dinner Draw fundraiser, which this year is centered around helping girls in East Africa and Central America gain access to menstrual hygiene products.

Ithaca Rotarian Dennis Gray has offered the challenge through Share the Gift of Water, the charity arm of his company, Backyard Brands Inc., which manufacturers water care treatments for pools, swim spas and hot tubs. Share the Gift of Water “supports projects focusing on community needs assessment, capacity building and sustainability that provide access to safe water and adequate hygiene to communities in need around the world,” according to a recent press release.

If all 300 tickets are sold, the Dozen Dinner Draw is expected to raise $15,000, as it has in past years. The purchase of every ticket after the 200th ticket gets matched through Backyard Brands, with the possibility of raising the overall amount to a maximum of $25,000.

As of the time of this publication, around 200 tickets have been sold so far. Tickets cost $50 and can be purchased through Feb. 8 at rotarydozendinnerdraw.org. The grand prize is 12 $100 gift certificates to restaurants in the Ithaca area.

The Ithaca Rotary’s Dozen Dinner Draw began about five years ago, started by Gray and his partner, Maricelis Acevedo, a research professor at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University. Gray has long had an interest in water, sanitation and hygiene, and Acevedo has lots of international experience through her work, so they decided to combine their two focus areas, they said.

“The idea of the Dozen Dinner Draw came about from our interest in working internationally and having a club that, despite having an interest in international, most of the activities were local — for the local communities,” Acevedo said. “There was an interest, but they were not sure how to connect the dots of local sustainability to do international work. So, with Dennis’s experience in that area, my experience working internationally, we brought a little bit of that passion to say, ‘We know how to do this in terms of capturing people’s attention and how to sell your idea.’”

Despite the draw being born out of a desire to help internationally, they still wanted to keep that local touch, Gray said.

“When we designed it, what we really wanted to do is we wanted to support local businesses,” he said. “All the way through, it’s about supporting the local restaurants and theaters and stuff like that. So, part of our goal was to have an international focus but, at the same time, to bring attention to the great entertainment, restaurants around here.”

Last year, as Tompkins Weekly reported (tinyurl.com/y84hwoqn), the Dozen Dinner Draw changed its formatting so that two-thirds of the funds raised went to local businesses, helping to support them through pandemic-related challenges. But this year, the original model is back, with the focus returning to international projects.

This year’s fundraiser launched in November with a focus on nonprofits “supporting safe, reusable and affordable menstrual hygiene products to ensure that girls live healthier lives and to help them stay in school,” according to the release. As Acevedo explained, that focus is mostly motivated by the fact that in many countries, girls have to miss school when on their period because there aren’t sanitation products or flush toilets at school.

“We thought that … we could help girls to stay in school by providing the menstrual products that they need, that they’re affordable, that they are accessible and even sustainable, they can wash them [and] they can control that process a little bit better,” she said. “And at the same time, … COVID brought up the fact of how important is to wash your hands. So, it was a perfect opportunity to kind of mix what they were already learning about sanitation and hygiene and mix it then with menstrual hygiene and education.”

One of the projects expecting to receive some of the raffle funds is Lansing’s Sewing Saints — Days for Girls, which has been crafting menstrual hygiene kits to send to girls in countries around the world since 2013. According to the release, the group has made more than 1,600 kits since being founded, distributing them to India, Central America and Africa.

The raffle funding will pay for two sewing machines and liner materials for a group of volunteers in Guatemala that is producing hygiene kits in their local communities, as well as cover the costs of material for 100 kits to be made by Lansing volunteers to send to global communities in need.

Linda Pasto, an Ithaca Rotary member and longtime volunteer with Days for Girls in Lansing, explained that Days for Girls’ mission especially focuses on making a lasting difference on a community.

“We’re not just handing money out,” she said. “We’re looking at, how can we help people make a difference in their world that we know that will be sustainable, that will be able to be continued? … You don’t want to just give money to projects and then it just fall apart the next year when there’s no money continuing. So, that’s one of the good things about these two projects is we know they are sustainable. And we’ve worked hard with both of the places that we’ve chosen to know that we will be able to affect a change with what we’re doing for them.”

Pasto described Gray’s challenge as “amazing” and said it will allow Days for Girls “to expand what we originally had planned to do for both the project in Uganda, with the digital literacy that we’ve been involved with, and with our Days for Girls projects.”

“I think it’s just incredibly generous and just will make such a difference,” she said.

The second project benefitting from raffle funds is one championed by Ithaca Rotarian Gertrude Noden, an Ithaca education consultant who founded Words into Deeds. Her nonprofit promotes youth awareness and engagement in global human rights issues. Dozen Dinner Draw funds will provide “training and materials to create reusable menstrual hygiene kits at three schools in Uganda and South Sudan,” according to the release.

In addition, a women’s cooperative in Gulu, Uganda, will train students to make and distribute liquid soap in their communities, with the sales revenue used to sustain production.

“We’re folding in financial literacy, digital literacy,” Noden said. “And this is everything that Rotary does. It just happens to be what I do too. So, we have a good partnership going. I don’t have to teach the choir; they already know the song. So, then the Dozen Dinner Draw comes around, and I’m like, ‘Well, I wonder if they’ll throw some money at this.’ And so, I submitted my proposal, and indeed, they selected it as one of their two recipients. … I asked for $12,500. The entire project on my end is $25,000.”

Like Pasto, Noden said Gray’s challenge will help to amplify her project’s impact.

“It makes the work much easier so you’re not struggling every dollar every decision you have to make,” she said.

Gray said that he decided to offer the challenge because he wanted to give the fundraiser an extra push and provide an incentive to residents.

“We knew this year was going to be a bigger challenge just because there’s been so much stress on the community, and everybody’s had to step in,” he said. “And so, we knew that was a challenge. But we believed in the cause of what we’re trying to do.”

Acevedo explained further.

“When we looked at the projects that were presented to us, we knew that they could use more funds now,” she said. “But we could not just sell an insurmountable number of tickets. So, … how can we support the community, support the projects, but at the same time, put the challenge to our team members into the community to say, ‘This is a great cause. And no, I’m not only telling you that is a great cause — I’m putting my money behind it’?”

The drawing for the raffle, which will award a total of six prizes, will be held Feb. 9 at 12:15 p.m. at the Rotary Club’s weekly meeting. Anyone who wants to attend the meeting can request a Zoom link at ithacarotary.com.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@vizellamedia.com.