The Wallaceburg Fireworks Family Festival committee is heading to Facebook for their next fundraiser, as the Canada Day festivities inch closer.
Tom Cogghe, a committee member, said they are about $2,000 shy of covering the costs for the festival portion of the event.
“We have enough for the fireworks and partial amount for the festival itself… so we’re doing one last push through a Facebook auction,” Cogghe said.
The total cost for the fireworks and festival, is somewhere between $13,000 and $15,000, Cogghe said.
“Starting on Monday (June 23) at 9 a.m. to Thursday (June 26) at 8 p.m. that is when the bidding is going to be LIVE,” he said. “We have a lot of donations in already, we’re getting some in every day. We’re asking people who want to donate stuff, any companies or businesses who can donate prizes to be auctioned off.”
Cogghe added: “We’ve already got about 20 prizes donated. Some people are seeing that we’re doing this, so they’re saying I want to donate this, I want to donate that. We’re putting the items up there and we’re also doing some advertising for the companies that are donating, putting links on there, descriptions about the prize and about the company donating. It’s a lot of good exposure for the businesses.”
Cogghe said the fireworks committee have been working hard with other fundraising initiatives as well.
“We had our trivia night last week,” he said. “We had about 60 people out, we had nine teams. We’re looking at making it an annual event. We raised about $2,000 through that.”
Cogghe said the community has worked hard the last few years to organize this event.
“The last couple of years we’ve done quite well and the Knights of Pythias have been a big part of it,” he said. “We’re taking over from them and we’re hoping that we can be successful this year and make it even bigger and better for the years to come.”
Cogghe said Argyle Street at Elm Street will be blocked off again this year from around 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., with the fireworks as the big finale for the evening.
“We have some bouncy castles for the kids, a kids entertainer, we have three or four bands lined up,” he said.
Cogghe said the community has really pulled together to make the event a reality.
“We got some grants to help us out, but with some of them we didn’t get quite as much as we were hoping for,” he said. “We had to put a bit more effort into it than what we were anticipating, but everyone on the committee and everybody in the community is coming together to help make it happen.”
Cogghe added: “We just hope to get the continued support. It is one of those events that obviously happens every year, Canada Day is a big day for our country and for the community to come together. We all remember watching fireworks as a kid and that is what we are trying to do. Most of us that are on the committee, we have kids ourselves, and we want them to have the same experiences that we had when we were younger.”
