The Woodland Community Swimming Pool Committee’s kickoff fundraising event on March 19 more than doubled the total funds raised in previous years.
At the event, held at Holland America Flower Farm, the committee raised $1.1 million, bringing its total to more than $2 million. Previously, the committee raised $995,000 of the $12.6 million campaign goal to build a community pool and YMCA in Woodland. The pool will sit beside Horseshoe Lake inside the Columbia-Willamette YMCA.
“This gets us started,” said Benno Dobbe, president of the committee, in a release. “It is a huge boost. We have some big plans to generate the rest of the dollars needed. This exceeded our expectations on how we had hoped to kick things off.”
The event featured live and silent auctions and was attended by 127 people, according to the same release.
The committee has a 3.7-acre site for the YMCA and pool, and the Portland-based Y signed an operating agreement years ago.
Safety and community building were themes at the event, with committee members putting forth a message about the importance of learning how to swim while living in a location with so much water nearby. The $12.6 million fundraising effort is known as the More Than A Pool Campaign.
“Having the YMCA be a part of this Woodland project is absolutely critical to what we are trying to do,” Dobbe said in the release. “This is more than a pool, after all, as it says in our campaign name. This is about the quality of life that a YMCA can provide in a community for decades to come. That is important.”
The campaign was in an awareness stage in 2014 and 2015, and looks to ramp up fundraising events this year, with hopes of breaking ground in 2017. Coming up, the committee has a mystery bus trip planned for June 11. In an email, Dobbe wrote that the committee will also make presentations about the community center for any group.
For more information about the campaign, go to www.woodlandYMCA.org.
