Thursday’s all-day giving spree in Southwest Washington, Give More 24!, reached out to people on multiple platforms. On the streets, on social media, on CVTV the night before — all to garner a collaborative spirit of giving.
By about 11 p.m., there had already been nearly 3,510 online gifts totaling more than $604,900.
“It was a force you could not ignore,” said Kate Sacamano, director of philanthropy at YWCA Clark County. Sacamano said she woke up to emails from her friends, asking her to donate to the nonprofits they support. Throughout the day, nonprofits were plugging the event and trying to win extra money through timed contests.
Sacamano and other YWCA staff members stopped by the giving lounge at the downtown Vancouver headquarters for the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington — the host and marketing power behind the event. In the lounge, people could snack, socialize and go online to donate on the Give More 24! website.
Amy Page sat at a desk in the giving lounge with a laptop, credit card at the ready.
“There’s so many,” she said, while scrolling through the list of more than 100 participating nonprofits. “I think I’m going to sort it by cause.”
After giving to a nonprofit she was already familiar with, Page wanted to find an education-focused cause. She heard about Give More 24! from a friend who works at the Community Foundation and liked the idea of the community getting together to give.
“A lot of donors are giving more and more online already,” said Maury Harris, marketing and communications director for the Community Foundation. The event helped introduce online giving to some nonprofits that hadn’t really worked with that format before.
Piano school plays, donates for roof repairs
Giving started in the early hours, and so did piano-playing at the School of Piano Technology for the Blind. For its first foray into Give More 24!, the small school decided to host a piano marathon from midnight to midnight.
“We thought about doing little concerts, but this makes more sense for us,” said executive director Cheri Martin, who brought her flute and wore a dress printed in piano notes for the occasion. “I call it my uniform.”
Student Jim Jackson was at the school bright and early, busting out some tunes. He signed up for another session later in the day.
“I have a piano teaching business. That’s why I came to school here,” he said.
Throughout the day, people played and did duets to encourage giving. The school wants to pay off the balloon mortgage payment on student housing, a little more than $5,600, which is due at the end of the month. Whatever’s left over after paying off the mortgage would go to technology upgrades and repairing the leaky roof, Martin said.
Helping them reach that goal was a bonus $1,000 they won for collecting the most donations between 2 and 5 a.m. A leaderboard on Give More 24!’s website showed that the school also garnered the most individual donations of any participating nonprofit.
Martin said the school figured it is too small and not well-known enough to get the big, obvious prizes, so it went for the more obscure insomniac award.
“We told them to strategize around the prizes,” said Maury Harris, marketing and communications specialist with the Community Foundation for Southwest Washington.
This is the second year for Give More 24!, and nonprofits seem to understand it better and are better at marketing themselves, Harris said.
Open House mural
Before lunchtime, residents and staff were nearly finished painting a mural on a storage container at Open House Ministries in downtown Vancouver.
“This was a pretty ordinary red storage container that we’re using for our retails shops,” said Judy McMorine, development director.
Now? It’s a bold backdrop of color, punctuated by silhouettes of children jumping. The mural will overlook the future family resource center, which is slated to be built in the gravel lot at West 13th and Ingall streets.
To make the silhouettes, resident children lay down, struck a pose and were traced. Friends of the Carpenter made some wooden figures of the children that were adhered to the storage container.
“The kids were ecstatic to be doing this,” McMorine said.
Three local artists, Tom Relth, Dean Popek and Don Gray, volunteered their design expertise. They gave painters tips on how not to drip paint and how to fill in tricky details such as fingers and hair. The inspiration came from a picture of people jumping taken during Open House’s annual block party.
Money raised during Give More 24! is going toward a shopping day, where resident children can pick out new school clothes and shoes.
“Many of our kids have never had that experience of getting something new,” McMorine said.
The mural is a three-day project. While working on the mural Saturday, one of the children took off their shoes and was walking around in socks because they didn’t have any other shoes to wear, McMorine said. About 50 to 60 percent of residents at Open House are children.
“This place here, Open House Ministries, it’s an amazing place,” said Randy Richardson, a former resident and staff member at Open House. He filled in a silhouette with his 4-year-old grandson, Bentley, who got paint on his hands, hair, face and jacket.
“I gotta wash him up, get him ready for school,” Richardson said.
Swinging for parks
Angie Holden, finance director at the YWCA, joined city council member Jack Burkman during his a 2 p.m. shift on the swing set in Esther Short Park.
As Holden started to pump her legs, she said, “I haven’t swung in …”
“Well, I’m not going to say how many years,” Burkman said with a laugh.
The Parks Foundation of Clark County had 24 local celebrities — mayors, city council members and board members — swung in 20-minute time slots throughout the day to get people donating and chatting about parks, said executive director Temple Lentz.
Most of the swing shifts took place at Esther Short Park, but Clark County’s smaller cities joined in, too. In the afternoon, there were people on the swing sets at Crown Park in Camas, Upper Hathaway Park in Washougal, Davis Park in Ridgefield and Lewisville Park, north of Battle Ground.
“We’re getting out there and using the parks,” Lentz said.
Seeing the signs, balloons and grown-ups on the swings led people to ask what they’re doing, and chime in on what they love about parks.
The swinging was a bit hard on the hips, the adults acknowledged, but the foundation got about $6,430 in donations by 11 p.m. That will benefit the foundation’s general fund, which goes to community grants for park project such as the merry-go-round at Crown Park.
