Today was the 9th Annual Legal Aid golf outing fund raiser for Tippecanoe County Legal Aid. I’ve been involved all nine years in one capacity or another, and this was the best one so far. This year, I was a member of a three person committee that pretty well organized the entire thing. There were something like 72 players and 34 sponsors; of which 1st Source Bank was the major one. My rough estimate is that we raised about $10k – $12k for Legal Aid which is an organization that provides free legal help to low income individuals in non-criminal, non-fee generating cases. (The government pays for lawyers for criminal cases; and, for fee generating cases, you can usually find a lawyer to take it on contingency.) A lot of the cases the Legal Aid attorneys handle are things like “Child In Need of Services” (CHINS) cases where you might have parental rights at stake — no money in it; not criminal; but a very important situation where you probably need a lawyer to help you out.
Organizing the event isn’t a huge undertaking. But, it’s not nothing either. My theory is that if all of a community’s citizens kick in a little bit of community oriented effort; the place is probably going to do o.k. In my case, my two major contributions, in terms of time spent on community activities, end up being organizing this golf outing and coaching my kids’ soccer teams.
Obviously it’s a lot easier to volunteer time and effort when the people you have good people to work with. And, I’ve certainly been fortunate to have that be the case for me. Looks like I’m up for at least a 10th year.
Yes sir.