Local clubs host 12th annual joint charity golf tournament

MOSES LAKE — The Kiwanis Club of Moses Lake and the Moses Lake Rotary Club put on their 12th annual Golf Scramble Friday, giving back to the community they reside in.

“We should net somewhere around $12,000 today, which will go all to Kids Hope for helping those kids,” said Moses Lake Rotary Club member Dave Campbell.

This year’s benefactor was Kids Hope Children's Advocacy Center, with the goal to raise money for resiliency kits for the children in the program.

The joint tournament was spawned when the presidents of the Kiwanis and Moses Lake Rotary clubs, who Campbell said were married, decided to team up and put on an event for the community to participate in. Campbell said he was the one who brought up the possibility of it being a golf tournament.

“They were thinking about an event they could do to benefit the local community,” Campbell said. “They talked to me, and I said I think we should do a golf tournament.”

There was some hesitation at first with hosting a golf tournament, but Campbell was quick to convince them otherwise.

“They said ‘Don’t you think there are enough golf tournaments,’ and I said ‘No!’” Campbell said. “It’s cause-related, we come up with a good cause and that’s what brings out people and sponsors, so it’s been real successful every year.”

Campbell said that the tournament decided to select Kids Hope as the recipient of the proceeds from the tournament after an idea of a club member, and was one of the two potential beneficiaries submitted for the tournament.

“We asked ‘If we were to get this money for you, what would you use it for,’” Campbell said. “That’s important to us too. We tend to earmark for specific things, whether it’s equipment or that kind of thing and not just generic funding.”

Kids Hope is an advocacy center based in Moses Lake that supports children who are survivors of neglect, physical and sexual abuse and other challenging situations. They give the children a safe space to be interviewed by a specially-trained forensic interviewer, according to the organization’s website. Kids Hope, an extension of New Hope, works with children from throughout Grant and Adams counties.

The money raised will go towards supplying the children in Kids Hope with resiliency kits, which could be a range of items.

“(Kids Hope) came back to us and said ‘Well, here’s something that we can’t fund with our regular funding, to get resiliency kits for kids,’” Campbell said. “For one kid it may be a new bicycle, for somebody else it might be books. The funding that they get won’t pay for that kind of stuff, so we took that back and said ‘that’s perfect!’”

Teams that entered the tournament consisted of four-person groups in a shotgun start style. The tournament began at 10 a.m. and ran until late afternoon on Friday.

Ian Bivona may be reached at ibivona@columbiabasinherald.com.