Happy Saturday!  Today is the big Hillbilly Hotfoot event in Maquoketa, Iowa.  There is still time to sign up and participate.

What’s with the grill full of burgers?  One of the things that makes me extremely proud to work for the organization I do is the way it gives back to the communities we serve.  There are so many ways that community banks in general help the communities they serve but our organization goes above and beyond.

This blog post today is about one of our banks and their unique and creative way of giving back to the community.  As you can imagine all banks are solicited on an almost daily basis for contributions and sponsorships of one kind or another.  One of our bank Presidents decided it was time to make a change in that never-ending cycle and still make a substantive contribution to worthy groups.  He based his philosophy on the principle of, “if you give a person a fish you feed them for a day (and they’ll be back tomorrow), if you teach them how to fish they will feed themselves for a life time.”

So when a group came to the bank looking for a donation they were presented with a different proposition.  “We’ll help you raise funds.”  From that was born “Grilling For Charity.”  Our organization supplies all the necessary items for the cookout including the labor, food, location, delivery, and some of the advertising and we ask the group to help by spreading the word in their circles of influence and helping with some of the labor.  It’s a big project and requires a lot of work to put one of these on.

You can imagine that it takes many of our employees (who we are paying for their work), all the food costs, and we deliver the food to all kinds of businesses.  All we ask for is a good will donation for the Charity we are grilling for.

Yesterday was the last grilling event for 2013 and it was held at our branch in Goose Lake, Iowa.  It was for the school booster club and was held on Home Coming Friday.  You can imagine the amount of food it takes to feed the entire football team.  🙂

Many of the local community members came out as well and it was another successful event.  This year this bank raised over $12,000 for charitable organizations.  Every dime that is contributed for the event is given to the Charity organization.

It gives me an enormous amount of pride to work with such an organization.  Congratulations to the entire team!

Thanks for stopping by the blog today.  I hope you enjoy your Saturday.  Be careful