Avalon Lions Raise Funds, Donate to Charity

To the Editor: 
Don’t ask me how I ended up here, it’s a long story, but it does have a happy ending. Besides, I have 600 words to tell it.
For 40 years I reported the news on television for Channel 3 until I retired in 2008.
I am now living in Avalon, and up until a few months ago was enjoying sleeping late and walking the beach.
Trouble is I can’t sit still. So I joined the Avalon Lions Club to help out at the Helen Diller Home for Blind Children. A few days a month in the summer, what is the big deal, I asked myself.
Trouble is I was a little off in my plan to help out. It turns out the Lions raise money and donate to 16 separate charities in Cape May County. They give tens of thousands of dollars to groups like Habitat for Humanity, Holy Redeemer Food Bank, Cape Counseling, CASA, Family Promise and Toys for Tots. All those funds take a lot of work to raise through a variety of means.
For most full-time residents and summer visitors, the Lions are the men and women in gold shirts with buckets standing outside supermarkets and resort stores asking for donations on holiday weekends. The truth is a lot more complicated. Dozens of fundraisers such as an annual golf tournament and concerts to pasta nights, take weeks of planning but it all pays off in donations that are raised here and stay here in Cape May County.
It may come as a surprise that poverty and hunger are a daily problem for too many families living just a few minutes from one of the most popular summer playgrounds in the nation. But with an unemployment rate of more than 13 percent, the need is right here at home. The good news is that the help is right here, too. As a former reporter who loved to tell the “good news stories,” I now have many positive stories to tell as the new public relations director for the Lions.
It is all volunteer and that is the way we like it. Keeps the overhead down and keeps more donated dollars heading where they are meant to go.
If all this sounds like a sales pitch, it is. You don’t have to buy anything though. Just realize the Lions are here. They are your neighbors, and as our motto says, we are here “To Serve.”
It turns out I still have nearly 200 words left, but as my editor always told me, shorter is better, so I will leave the rest of the story to you, our neighbors in Cape May County.