Your heart is pounding in your chest, your palms are sweaty and your stomach is in knots. You are in the home stretch of the race and you can see the finish line. You only need to run hard for another 100 meters to break the tape and win the gold. The excitement is so overwhelming you are shaking.
This same feeling should be pulsing through each of you as we come into the home stretch of making the dream of the Rock County Community Center a reality. We have been warming up for years, collecting donations and visiting with people about the possibility of a community center. When the starting gun fired, we sprinted out to a quick start, gathering money from donors. It was quickly realized that it was a marathon and not a sprint.
In 2021, Rock County Community Fund (RCCF) kept putting one foot in front of the other and kicked off the Community Challenge Grant. We made the goal to raise $250,000 and the community stepped up and made donations and pledges to meet our goal in less than a year. Due to these efforts we were able to apply for and receive a grant from the Peter Kiewett foundation. During this time, we continued to make strides towards completion when the City of Bassett committed to ownership of the community center. This partnership ensured that the facility would be a longstanding feature within our community and opened us up to additional funding opportunities.
The race really began to heat up when, in 2022, RCCF held multiple community input sessions to gather information from the community on the wants and needs of our future community center and worked diligently with the City of Bassett to apply for grants and develop operational plans. Through these efforts RCCF and the City of Bassett were recently awarded $862,000 in grants, bringing us to our total of $1,857,321.74 of our $2,013,045.00 project. As we round the corner into the last stretch of race, excitement is building! It is 2023 and we need your help to cross the finish line. This is it, the final stretch, we need $155,723.26 to bring this project to fruition.
Is your heart pounding yet? Are your palms sweaty? Is your stomach in knots? Are you so excited you are shaking? We are so close! With your help, our community will have a beautiful community center up and running by fall of 2024. Donations can be made online at www.rockcountycommunityfund.com or by contacting a board member for a pledge form. If you have any questions on how to make a donation, please reach out to a RCCF member. The future is now. Let’s get across the finish line and win one for Rock County.
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