District Foundation

As I sit at my computer trying to formulate a message to all my brothers and sisters in our great New York District of Kiwanis, I find myself filled with many things I want to say to you. My first order of business is to wish you good health in the face of this terrible Coronavirus pandemic.
I want to tell you about what we, at the New York District Kiwanis Foundation are doing to try and mitigate the financial losses that we will incur this year. As you know, very early in March after many phone calls to state agencies, camping organization, and other related organization, our Kamp director Rebecca and I made the very hard decision to close Kamp Kiwanis for this season. Although this was a decision that I never thought we would ever make, I believe that it was the best thing to do to keep the children, seniors and everyone else involved in the Kamping season safe.
Our entire board of directors has met via teleconferencing and our finance committee will also be meeting in the next few days similarly. We are all trying to do our best to come up with ideas reduce spending and increase revenue to save our Kamp. During this pandemic, Kiwanis Clubs cannot meet, cannot have their annual fundraisers, basically all streams of revenue has been severely hampered and we understand that. We also understand that this pandemic does not only affect the Kiwanis community, it is a global problem so other streams of revenue are also affected. The problem for us is that we are a brick and mortar entity so we have costs that cannot be avoided. We have electricity, gas, insurance, payroll and many other expenses that come up and must be paid. We are in the process of bringing all these costs to the bare minimum but they cannot be eliminated.
Hopefully in the next issue of this publication I will be able to say to you that we are doing better and at the same time you are doing better as well. Let's hope so.
I do want to particularly give my heart felt gratitude to the those clubs that decided to give the money that they would have sent for Kampers as an unrestricted donation to Kamp Kiwanis and those individuals that also sent donations to help us with this emerging situation. To those clubs and their members and individuals, no words can ever express our gratitude for this action.

Column Posted on Web Site April 7, 2020