A 56-year-old tradition in its final hours as the Putnam County Kiwanis Club Auction raises money for local student initiatives.
Putnam County Kiwanis Club President Bob Palmer said proceeds from the online auction have been used in a lot of ways over the years. Palmer said the club purchased adaptive playground equipment for students with special needs. Palmer said another focus, higher education.
“We’ve been doing scholarships for graduating seniors for years,” Palmer said. “In fact, we’ve given about 250 scholarships away to graduating seniors, which amounts to about three quarters of a million dollars.”
Some 463 lots available through this year’s Kiwanis Club auction. The auction can be found online at the Tays Auction website. It ends on Tuesday.
Palmer said other initiatives covered by auction proceeds are Key Clubs in county high schools and building programs in the middle schools. Palmer said the Kiwanis Bring Up Grades program, which throws pizza or ice cream parties for students who improve their grades by one letter, is also funded through the auction.
In addition, Kiwanis helps with the Stuff the Bus program and Food to the Rescue every year. Palmer said it is important to fund these initiatives because of their impact on kids.
“The members are a group of people, mostly business people, people who are interested in giving back to the community,” Palmer said. “And we want to help children and students be the best that they can possibly be.”
Palmer said the auction used to be fully in person, and people from Tays would help run it. Palmer said Tays helped push the Kiwanis Club auction to fully online, and it has been that way for around 11 years.
“At first, there was a learning curve, and we didn’t do as well,” Palmer said. “We did better than we did on the live auction because we had more lookers and more people bidding. It has continued to build over that period of time, and results of about three to four times what we did when we first started as far as funds raised.”
Palmer said the auction has a little bit of everything. Items include gift cards, haircut certificates, furniture, even loads of gravel, and a nine foot tall Secretariat statue. Palmer said local businesses donated the items.
