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La Habra Volunteers
Volunteers of the La Habra Office redoubled their
fund-raising efforts to ensure people with CF, including
the Cowan triplets (above), have hope for a better future.
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For a year, Foundation staff had prepared for their fall 2006 fund-raisers. For months, volunteers had collected more than $200,000 worth of auction items. In minutes, it was all gone.
On October 1, 2006, fire ripped through the Southern California Chapter's La Habra Office. Everything was destroyed.
With just a week to go before a wine and champagne brunch—the first of five events scheduled before the end of 2006—Ginney Gonzalez, the office’s director of development, thought, “That’s it. We have to cancel everything.”
But it wasn’t long before Gonzalez came to a different conclusion. “I decided that it would be just as much trouble to cancel the brunch as it would be to go ahead with it,” she says. The event’s committee chairs agreed. Despite the odds stacked against them and with just five days before the event, everyone immediately flew into action, finding new auction packages to sell and volunteering extra hours to pull the event together. “If we get 10 items, we’ll go ahead with 10 items,” Gonzalez told volunteers. “If we get 100, we get 100. We’ll just do the best we can.”
Did anyone think they were crazy to go ahead with their plans under these circumstances? “Mostly people just asked ‘How?’” says Nancy Meyers, the chair for the brunch. “But we were determined. We weren’t going to let a fire stop us.”
Using the Long Beach CF Vintage and Thrift Store, where Meyers is a volunteer manager, as a collection place for the new auction items, volunteers rolled up their sleeves and got to work. Notes kept by committee members, and the fresh memory of who had recently donated items and services for the auctions, helped organizers retrace their steps. “We went back to all our donors and told them what had happened,” Meyers says. “And they donated again. A lot of other people gave things too, when they heard about the fire.”
As word spread, more help came, some from surprising sources. “Big companies who had never offered us support before came through with some great donations,” Gonzalez says. “They sent truckloads. It was amazing!”
One local woman, who had read about the fire in the newspaper, decided to donate her entire Beanie Baby collection—1,200 of them, in pristine condition. More help came from the National Office and other CF Foundation chapters, both locally and from around the country. With everyone working together, they pulled it off. The first two events, both held less than two weeks after the fire, raised $88,000. By the end of the year, the La Habra office bypassed its goals set before the fire by raising an astounding $380,000.
Meyers, who first volunteered for the Foundation more than 40 years ago as a high school student, says she isn’t surprised at the positive response they received from everyone involved. “The people who volunteer for CF are just so giving and supportive,” she says. “And it’s so meaningful to know that the money we raise goes toward research, and that the research is making a real difference in the lives of people with CF.”
While it took generosity from a variety of sources to turn things around, Gonzalez knows that it was the commitment and hard work of her volunteers that was the key to turning a nightmare into a dream come true. “We couldn’t have done it without them,” she says. “Everybody stepped up. It was just tremendous.”
Posted 03/01/07
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