Key Club indebted to club parents
Key Club, a community service club, might be taking from the community instead of giving.
Key Club borrowed approximately $700 from its officers’ parents this past summer to pay for entrance "donations" for the American Cancer Society’s annual Relay for Life in Campbell this past summer.
To be eligible to participate in Relay for Life in Campbell, which was held July 11-12 this year, each entrant must raise a minimum of $100 which is donated to the American Cancer Society. In past years, the money would have been provided by Key Club members. However, Key Club officers found this method pointless towards achieving the goal as members failed to properly fundraise.
"[Previous years’ Key Club members] didn’t even fund raise," vice president senior Joyce Zheng said. "My family just wrote a check for $100."
Zheng was not alone. Many other past Key Club members also failed to actually fundraise the money they donated.
To rectify this flawed method, Key Club officers this year attempted to emphasize the importance of
actively fundraising. "Everyone only had to donate 25 dollars," president senior Mahlet Yared said. Key Club officers subsidized the rest of the minimum "donation", promising to fundraise the rest as a club. The officers believed that this would be more beneficial for both the community and members.
To earn the rest of the money, Key Club planned to hold club fundraisers ."Those purple bandannas we sold last year — all that went to Relay for Life [in Campbell]," treasurer sophomore Jeffrey Zhang said.
However, due to an increased interest in attending Relay for Life and a decrease in the amount fundraised, Key Club found itself in need of more money — money they ended up borrowing from parents.
"We were going for about 10 people," Zheng said, "but it turns out there were 18 or 19 people who wanted [to come]."
In addition, a couple of Key Club’s planned car washes, one of their main fund raisers, were canceled due to Santa Clara’s drought restrictions on water, leading to a smaller amount of money collected than was expected.
However, despite this debt, Key Club officers remain confident that their decision was the right one
as the officers had set down firm rules that each member had to raise $25 individually.Key Club is also on the cusp of paying back the money that they borrowed. "We’ve fundraised most of it," Yared said. "We didn’t want to pay back just one parent."
