Rotary Happenings: Sanibel-Captiva Rotary Club’s 34th annual Art & Craft Fair was great success
One hundred and fifteen booth tents went up and 115 booth tents went down over this past President’s Day weekend on the grounds of the newly renovated Sanibel Community House.
Sanibel-Captiva Rotary Club’s 34th annual Art & Craft Fair was a tremendous success and thanks to an outstanding group of dedicated Rotarians and Rotary friends working on this event for the last nine-months San-Cap Rotary will be able to continue their financial support of local and global charitable organizations and non-profits providing hope and encouragement to an array of projects like a 5-year $85,000 pledge to the Sanibel Community House for the reconstruction and theatrical fittings for the SCA auditorium Rotary stage, kitchen project, and cooking classes for children in our community; C.R.O.W.; Human Trafficking Awareness; to micro-loans for coffee farmers in Honduras and POLIO prevention worldwide.
Projects our Rotary Club supports each year are centered on needs improving the lives of people and building stronger bonds and friendship between world citizens at home and aboard. Rotary’s six avenues of focus are: maternal and children’s health, literacy/education, clean water, disease prevention, growing local economies, and world peace. Each year Rotary gives out three college scholarships with encouragement to give back to the community and be aware of Rotary’s goals and Rotary’s six avenues of focus.
San-Cap Rotary’s well-tuned fair committee did an amazing job with a special challenge this year because of the new Community House plot-plan requiring a new fair plot-plan for placement of over 115 booth spaces between and surrounding the newly renovated Community House and extending the fair footprint into the Community Park beyond the children’s playground for our new Food Court area.
It didn’t help that going toward the weekend the Community House was still planting landscape material and painting both inside and outside areas of the CH. But our exceptional logistic chairperson, Dick Waterhouse and his merry team of men and women, were right on top of all this. Some last-minute tweaking of the fair plot-plan took place, but everything came together and Dick was still smiling most of the time throughout the four-day ordeal of preparing the ground space for the booths, getting the surrounding plastic fences in place, putting up signage, making sure the utilities needed on the grounds where working correctly, moving in the portable toilets, placing of trash receptacles, and then backing out fair mode breaking down tents, removing fencing, clearing and cleaning the ground space, taking down signage and transporting it to storage and a plethora of other little thingsYowzah!! Yowzah!! Yowzah!!
Of course even before that, our Fair Committee led by Robert Monk and Scot Congress was hard at work: artisans’ liaison Robert Monk; juried exhibitors committee; marketing/advertising and TAB gurus-Charlie Emerson, Chet Sadler, and Dan Cohn; silent auction-Roger Triftshauser and Roger Grogman; volunteer coordinator-Jack Alexander, fair communication director-John Carney, Rotary clothing sales-Rachael Tritaik- To Luc Century for Fair 17 T-Shirt design and engraving of Best-In-Show award, chief money handlers-John Danner and Don Russell, fair accounting-Jack Alexander, Rotary coffee sales-Chet Sadler; ribbon committee from FGCU Art program, parking-Sunrise Fort Myers Rotary Club and our roving exceptional troubleshooters Holli Martin and Clair Beckman. And a big shout out to our new food-court manager – Little Joe – and Smoothies by Lorraine, and Kettle Corn and Nuts.
It does take a village to make one of these events happen, a village of like-minded individuals that believe in service to others/ “service above self”- Rotary International’s Motto and funding that service commitment by working hard on fundraising events such as Sanibel-Captiva Rotary’s Art & Craft Fair.
San-Cap Rotarians would also like to thank our fair sponsors Congress Jewelers, Sunny 106.3, John Grey Painting, Royal Shell Vacations, The Sanibel Captiva Trust Company, and Sanibel Captiva Community Bank; to our TAB advertisers, Silent Auction contributors, The Community House, and The City of Sanibel.
Thanks for enhancing our Fair attendees experience: Quik Pack & Ship and our Rotary outreach partners, Miracles in Action Beads, Shelter Box and De La Gente, Sanibel Boy Scouts.
Enormous thanks to the Island Reporter, Island Sun, Santiva Chronicle and NewsPress for their support with public relations and advertising for Sanibel-Captiva throughout the year.
And finally, thanks to all fair attendees – you make this fair a success every year.
Next week’s column will focus on our 14 new members in the last six months. We must be doing something right.
Sanibel-Captiva Rotary meets at 7 a.m., every Friday morning, at the Dunes Golf & Tennis Club. Guests are always welcomed.