Tuesday night the 10 Squared Plus Men of Guthrie County got together for their final meeting of the year at Tin Lizzie’s in Casey.

There were 65 members of the group present to decide which organization they would make their donation to. Founder Barry Monaghan started the meeting by sharing that it was the 25th meeting of the organization, and that once it was over they would have donated over $400,000 to 26 different organizations in Guthrie County. He shares with Raccoon Valley Radio what gave him the idea to start the group.

“Actually, I saw a clip on TV news in Des Moines that they had 100 plus men, and so they had actually used their donation for football equipment at North High School. And I kind of thought that maybe we could do that out here. I wasn’t completely convinced that we could do it in an individual community, but I thought if we brought the whole county in, that we could probably come up with at least 100 people.”

The three causes that were nominated were for renovations of the Adair – Casey / Guthrie Center wrestling room, the Guthrie County First Responders, and the donation of Christmas hams to residents of Guthrie County. Once the votes were tallied, Monaghan announced that the GCFR were the 26th organization to receive a donation from 10 Squared Plus Men. Jotham Arber was the one to present on behalf of GCFR, and shares what the funding will be used for.

“So specifically, like I said, it will go to the EMT (emergency medical technician) training. So to train an EMT, it costs about $1,000 with books, with ride time that needs to be done, and then also the curriculum that needs to be used with community colleges. It will go to equipping those EMTs or EMRs with bags that include things like BVMs or bag valve masks for oxygen for those patients, glucose in the bags for folks that are hypoglycemic. Any piece of equipment that you would see on the back of an ambulance that could be put into the field will probably be purchased at different levels. So specifically, those are things that that money will be used for.”

Arber mentions that the current short term goal for GCFR is to have 15 individuals certified as EMTs.