$125,000 and nineteen months: how the pancake circuit funded two counsellors
The Trumpeter Club set out to fund youth counselling without a gala, a naming right, or a single silent auction. It worked.
The cheque presented Tuesday at the Northbank youth clinic was for $125,000, and the club that raised it would like the record to show there was no gala involved. No gala, no naming rights, no silent auction of donated weekends at somebody's lake place. Pancakes, mostly.
The Trumpeter Club — twenty-two members, average age the club declines to publish — set the target nineteen months ago after the clinic's waiting list for youth counselling passed ninety days. The money funds two counsellor positions for two years, which the clinic says converts the list from a queue into an appointment.
The method was volume: forty-one pancake breakfasts, the concession at every home game the rink would give them, and a standing arrangement with three farm families who donate a steer a year and let the club keep the auction proceeds. The single biggest line item was $9,200 from one February breakfast that happened to coincide with a rig crew's days off.
The clinic's director, accepting the cheque, noted the club had declined to have the counselling room named after it. The club president's answer is already local legend: "The room is for the kids. Put their art on the door. We're just the pancakes."
