Over the past few weeks we focused on helping Hanover Square get through a tough time, fundraising to help power our mission further, and setting our organization up for success over the long term.
It's been all over the news lately that the construction in Hanover Square lately has cut sales for small locally owned businesses in the area by more than 50%. This came at a tough time, when they typically do their best business: during the holiday season.
In order to help out, we planned one of our networking nights to be located in Hanover Square. We were able to get over 60 people to turn out and help support Hanover (Syracuse's first business district). 60+ people showing up sent a message that they believe in Syracuse and are willing to take action to keep it moving forward.
A month and a half ago we launched our first fundraising campaign in order to power our mission further and promote the positive things happening in Syracuse. Last Thursday was the deadline for folks to join our founding contributors club. When we closed that initial fundraising campaign which lasted about a month, we had raised $3,749! Well over our initial goal of raising $500!
HUGE thank you goes out to all 93 of you who contributed and a special thanks to those who helped fundraise for us: Nicole Wafer, Mike Rautins, Mary Beth Gayne and Alison Zales! (If you recruited others to chip in and were left off this list of fundraisers, please let me know).
Here's how the fundraising campaign broke down by the numbers:
On Thursday January 30th Believe in Syracuse will celebrate its first birthday party. It will be at 6PM at Small Plates in Armory Square. Put this on your calendar, plan to come and spread the word. This will be the culmination of everything we've done in our first year and it will be a lot of fun.
There are so many positive things happening in Syracuse. Our economy is on the rise with Downtown Syracuse booming. Onondaga Lake is being cleaned up and improving by leaps and bounds. Say Yes to Education and others are making our schools better. Syracuse is big enough to have many things to do and have plenty of cultural opportunities while being small enough to have a great quality of life and feel like home.
Thank you so much for believing in Syracuse. Thank you so much for believing in us. Stick with us and together we'll keep Syracuse moving forward for years to come.
John DeSantis
Believe in SyracusePride, Progress, Community
315-657-7478 [email protected]
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