Good morning, everyone! Hope y’all have been enjoying the extra hour of sunlight like we have. The vibe in the office has been that of relief and peace, because all the planning we did for the 6th Annual Gala-Q has come to fruition!
We want to extend a heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who attended, bid on our auction items, bought our “fund-a-need” party favors, or even just donated a buck or two. We’re still tabulating numbers right now, as some donations are still coming in, but we have a partial result we’d like to share… Amongst all the ticket sales, sponsorships, donations, auction items, and other crazy things that happened on the night of the event, we raised… drum-roll please…
$210,175.14 !
Wow… We are speechless. I don’t know if we can thank you guys enough for the support that we got for this event. This year, we established a goal outright of $200,000 raised overall, and y’all knocked that out of the park easily– and then some. Of that, about $98,558 of that amount is going directly towards our special needs payroll. That’s enough to pay 30 full-time special needs adults for almost two months– over 13,500 hours of work that we can compensate for a job well done. And money set aside for payroll means we can put new money towards other things, like moving people off the waiting list, or gaining more workstations, or even funding new vehicles or new locations. We really cannot overstate how much your support means to us, truly.
So what does this mean for the bakery in the future? Honestly, we don’t have a lot of plans, since we’ve been spending so much energy on planning the event… but I suspect we’ll be moving some special needs adults off the waiting list soon. This tends to be the time of year where we have the freedom to do so, and it’s always a high priority on our list. In any case, you’ll have to keep your eyes peeled for whatever we end up doing. We always keep our social media platforms up to date, so follow us by finding the social icons at the top-right corner of this page!
That’s all for now! Thank you all so much for your continued support. It’s only because of y’all that we can help others in our community, and we don’t intend on stopping anytime soon. Have a blessed week!