Fitness hop raises funds for charity through sweat equity

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Click here to enlarge this photo Submitted photo Abigail Sellner, Rachel Haley and Madeline Sellner made sure participants in the Forget-Me-Not Fitness Hop received goodie bags before leaving the Northeast Community Center on March 26. E-Mail This Article | Print This Story

Two women who'd been friends in high school met and reconnected after 15 years when their kids were attending Sunderland Elementary School. They found that their lives had evolved along some parallel paths after high school. Both have a strong commitment to community service.

Nancy Haley, a former fitness trainer and a cancer survivor, is organizing her own nonprofit foundation as a vehicle to raise funds for community health needs.

Angela Walters serves as the president of the board of another nonprofit community organization, Adult Daycare of Calvert County. Like all nonprofit organizations, ADC has a continuing need to raise funds, so Walters is always on the lookout for ways to raise much needed funds for the ADC.

ADC provides a vital community service by providing daycare five days a week for adults 18 years of age to seniors; persons who are physically and mentally incapacitated. ADC gets some public funding through the state, but the care of persons who can't care for themselves is an expensive enterprise, and additional operating funds must be found from a variety of private sources.

In one of Haley's and Walters' encounters — Haley thinks it was a chance meeting in the grocery store — they got to discussing potential fundraising strategies. Haley remembered a benefit for Calvert Memorial Hospital that Calvert Fitness organized in 1987. The Hospital Hop was so successful it became an annual event for the next decade, thanks to the spirit and energy of Noreen Stedman, the founder and owner of Calvert Fitness. Walters and Haley decided to use the same idea as a fundraising event to benefit the ADC.

Together, these old friends put together the Forget-Me-Not Fitness Hop, "taking the ultimate challenge to benefit the ADC." The hop was held on Saturday morning March 26 at the Northeast Community Center. For one small cash donation, anyone could come into the gym for up to four hours of group sessions with seven local fitness trainers. This was an incredible deal, considering that these fitness professionals usually work for considerably larger fees.

The energy crackling through the gym at the Northeast Community Center that Saturday morning could have powered more windmills than even the gale winds that have bedeviled the county for months. From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., the instructors led sessions in their individual exercise and fitness routines, from jazzercise through kick-boxing, pilates, yoga stretches and other even more exotic disciplines.

For those four hours, the center's large gym was filled to capacity with sweating fitness mavens, each of whom had paid the minimum donation of $20. This entitled the donor to stay for the entire morning. A person could stay and go through as many of the sessions as he or she wished, as long as their resolve — and their wind — could hold out. That basic donation also entered the holder into a raffle of donated goods and services.

Calvert Fitness, for many years the only organized and certified fitness group in the county, went out of business several years ago. This was at least partly because its primary owner, Noreen Stedman, became incapacitated by Alzheimer's, and goes to ADC several days a week. Haley was trained as a fitness instructor by Stedman, and she has remained close to the Stedman family. Haley wanted to dedicate this fundraising event to Stedman, who had the original idea of the fitness hop for the hospital benefit.

Organizing this event and making it run smoothly takes lots of work, and this was done by a boatload of volunteer help. Everyone had something to do; the ADC staff and board members, family members, and many friends were attending to all the ongoing tasks. Fifteen former Calvert Fitness trainers were on hand to work out and help out. The younger set was in there pitching, too, including the small fries, who functioned as unofficial greeters.

Haley's whole family was involved, including her kids and her mother, Pearl Haley, who is an alumna of the Calvert Fitness classes. Several local corporate sponsors for the event provided some healthy cash donations, and many other businesses and private parties donated goods or services for the raffle, including T-shirts with the Forget-Me-Not logo.

Many of the people who came to exercise at the hop were either former Calvert Fitness staff, or had worked out at those classes for years, and wanted to honor their former mentor. The average age of these participants appeared to be around 50 years, although some of the more recent fitness disciplines, like Zumba and kickboxing, seemed to attract a younger, unaffiliated participant crowd.

This fundraising event was unique in that it provided an immediate benefit to the donors as well as the beneficiary organization. Usually, donors to some charitable cause only get the immediate good feeling that comes from diverting personal funds to a good cause: by the satisfaction of doing a good deed. This time, the donors got an immediate physical benefit as well — a whole-body aerobic workout to improve their muscle tone and heart health.

The other benefit of this "twofer" event is the much-needed transfusion of funds into the ADC's operating budget. Although the people who use ADC's service pay for daycare, the fees are on a sliding scale, so those with less pay less — sometimes considerably less. Daycare at a facility like the ADC is not a simple operation. Daycare means just that — the unceasing care of persons who are unable to care for themselves.

Care means having enough staff who can not only do the housekeeping tasks, like preparing and serving food and attending to the client's physical wellbeing, but highly trained health care staff to manage the daily programming, and to do the physical or cognitive therapy that many of the center's clients need on a daily basis. Some clients need transportation to and from the facility, so ADC must have well-maintained handicap accessible passenger vans.

Haley is considering making the fitness hop an annual event. For those who are physically sluggish, it's a good way to kickstart a regular personal fitness routine while doing a community good.

For more information about the ADC program, go to www.adcofcalvertcounty.org.

patullberg@comcast.net