EDITORIAL: The Rossland Olympic Challenge
By Rossland Telegraph
Sometimes something really good can come from something sort of bad. Following city council’s pained decision last month to reject George Grey’s request for funding support (a decision supported by the Rossland Telegraph, we confess), a new movement has arisen to help raise funds for Rossland’s two 2010 Olympians, George Grey and Kimberly Joines.
After rejecting Grey’s request for city support, Mayor Greg Granstrom stated that he would like to see 500 individual Rosslanders donate twenty dollars each in order to come up with the $10 000 that Grey had requested. That remark got a few people thinking, including we here at the Telegraph. Why not try to make that happen, we thought? And why not include Parolympian Kimberly Joines as well? While we couldn’t see using taxpayer money for such a purpose, we were still eager to do what we could to support the athletes themselves.
As we began to mull over the possibility of such a campaign, we discovered that city councillors Kathy Moore, Hanne Smith, and Jill Spearn along with some other friends and allies, were thinking the same thing. The result?
The Rossland Olympic Challenge.
The goal of the Rossland Olympic Challenge is ambitious: to raise $20 000, ten thousand dollars each for Joines and Grey. All Rosslanders are encouraged to donate what they can. While $20 per athlete is a terrific ballpark figure, any donation makes a big difference to our athletes as they struggle to support themselves and keep training right up until the opening ceremonies this winter.
Rossland Mayor Greg Granstrom endorses this effort, saying, “The support of the community is best expressed by the individuals of the community. The compounding of individual actions into a ground swell of support is truly what makes a community strong and proud.”
So give what you can. A dollar helps, and so does a hundred dollars. Our goal is to show the world what Rossland is made of, that we’re a town that stands behind its residents as they aspire toward dreams that make us all proud. Any town can use tax dollars to make things happen with the stroke of a bureaucratic pen: Rossland is a town where people pull together and make things happen as a community. That’s how Red Mountain got started. That’s how Grey’s home club of Black Jack got started too. The Rossland Olympic Challenge is that sort of campaign. A Rossland sort of campaign.
Proud Rosslanders have three ways to give to this campaign. There’s a Paypal page on this paper’s site that will allow you to pay online, you can go into the Nelson and District Credit Union and make a deposit to the Rossland Olympic Challenge’s account there, or you can drop some money into the donation jars placed strategically around town.
We also encourage you all to post comments to the Telegraph in support of our athletes as they gear up for the Games. We’ll be posting regular updates to show you how close we’re getting to our goal and we plan to hand over the loot and printed copies of all the good wishes to George and Kim before they head off to Whistler in January.
Our money’s on the table. How about yours?
