Over $35,000 was raised at the 20th Annual Jefferson Rotary Dinner and Auction fundraiser this past Friday at the Greene Room events center of Wild Rose Casino and Resort in Jefferson.

Auction Chair Joel Williams says over 160 people attended the event, where $30,300 was brought in from the live auction and another $6,505 came from the silent auction. He adds that there were two Caribbean trips that each went for $3,000, while the African safari trip went for $2,500 and the Maui trip went for $2,600.

At the end of the evening, Williams notes that there was a special “Fund-A-Need” campaign for the Greene County Early Learning Center. They are looking to either renovate their current facility or possibly build a new facility, with a goal of $1.2 million for either project. Williams says they had a kind of “kick-off” for their fundraising efforts in which close to $14,000 was raised.

Williams points out that the majority of the money from the annual fundraiser will go back into the community through grants, as it did last year. “During our auction grant committee meetings we had over $100,000 in requests, for the $40,000 that we were giving away. We’d love to grant all of those applications and we simply can’t.”

He says the grant applications will be available soon. Since 1999, Jefferson Rotary has raised more than $540,000 to support programs for local schools, youth, community projects and humanitarian projects of Rotary International.