Archive: Around Town

It sounds like a television game show.  A raffle winner gets to run around a grocery store, filling a cart with as much as he can for three minutes.  The food is his prize.  That is just what happened Wednesday -- sans the television show -- when the Lansing-Ithaca Rotary Club held its first three minute food run at Lansing Market.  The event was held to benefit the Lansing Food Pantry.  The Winner was Lansing Highway Superintendent Charlie Purcell.  Purcell donated all the food he was able to grab to the Food Pantry.

"It's for a good cause and it's good fun," says club member AnnMarie Hautaniemi.  "It's always fun when they do the run.  It's just silly."

Lansing Town Supervisor Ed LaVigne was tapped to choose the winning raffle ticket from a big jar Monday.  The drawing was held at Lansing Market, where the big event was scheduled to take place Wednesday.



The Lansing-Ithaca Rotary is small -- about ten members -- but active.  In April they partnered with the Lansing Lions Club and the Lansing Faculty Association in a chicken barbecue to raise money for local scholarships.  This year the club wanted a project that could be handled by a small number of people.  They reached out to Will and Brian Buttner of the Dryden Rotary that has hosted a three minute food run at Clark's Food Market for many years.  They printed the tickets for the Lansing-Ithaca club, and offered advice on how best to structure the event.

"We were looking for a local project," says Lansing Ithaca Rotary President Kathryn Mapes.  "We worked on polio the year before, but we were looking for something we could work on locally that we wouldn't have to explain.  We picked the Lansing Food Pantry."

Raffle tickets were on sale in the Lansing Market vestibule for a month before the run.  Over 400 tickets were sold over the course of the month before the run.  Tickets were sold at $5 apiece, and with about $500 worth of donations the club raised about $2,700.

"What surprised me is the generosity of the people of Lansing -- the number of tickets they bought and the amount of money they brought in," said Club Treasurer Ed Siemon.  "We were originally concerned that we would only sell enough ticket to pay for the food."


In the end they raised quite a bit more than the cost of the food.  Purcell managed to fill his cart with $77.14 worth of groceries, and because he gave it back, the Food Pantry will receive the full value of the money raised.

Mapes says she thinks the food run will become an annual event for the Lansing-Ithaca chapter.

"I think it would work well, because it is something just a few of us can do," she says.  "That's what we were looking for, something that a small group of people could make money at."

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