Hello All!
Whew, what a year it’s been and in particular what a Spring it’s been. The PDC and its 350+ strong volunteer labor force made our first full Spring Training season in 4 years a major success! We are so blessed to have so many dedicated people that make up our Team.
In our 30th Year of Giving, we held a 30 for 30 celebration where we hosted 1 past grant recipient per day at our games. It was educational, exciting, and satisfying to get our good works and that of these wonderful programs out in front of the public each day! In addition, our 3 areas of Spring Training where we can raise funds for our youth charities were particularly successful. The Auction Table, Speech Pitch activity and 50/50 Raffle combined brought in just short of $100,000 for us to give to the kids! Yay!!
Right after Spring Training season, there was no time to rest on our laurels with activities every weekend in April following it up. We once again supported the City’s event of the Easter Eggstravaganza and then helped host the Savannah Bananas baseball craziness. What a good time that was had by those that witnessed that! Our fundraiser that evening brought in over $5000. We hope they will return to our stadium again sometime soon.
Our FoodStock food truck festival proved once again to be an event on to itself. It was a HUGE success for the PDC and we are looking forward to possibly adding FoodStock 2.0 to our calendar in the fall. Stay tuned! The April 15th festival garnered about $27,000 that we were able to distribute to the food insufficient in our communities. Thank you to all that came out to support us!
We added a new fundraiser in conjunction with the Peoria Unified School District and arranged for all 7 high school baseball teams to play one of their regularly scheduled AIA games in our stadium. A treat for those kids and a fundraiser that brought us half of what we needed for our Emerging Leader Scholarships that we annually give in May. Those scholarships benefit 1 student from each of the 41 PUSD schools to support their continued education.
As the weeks are flying by and our June brings our fiscal year to a close, we can be proud of all of the hard work and the high numbers we were able to generate this year. We sincerely appreciate all who have helped to make it happen. Let us know if you or someone you know would like to learn more on how to help us help the kids!
Have a safe, happy and healthy summer!