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Here are some articles from Wilmington's newspaper for you:
Beck donates $51k to Murphy Theatre
Beck and his wife, Tania, recently sent a check for $51,000 to the Murphy Theatre to help repair its aging infrastructure — a five-project undertaking which is expected to cost more than $500,000.
“I literally started crying,” said Murphy board member Leslie Keller when recalling the phone conversation she had with Beck’s representative. Keller had called to ask if Beck and his production team would donate $5,500 to the theater’s fund-raising campaign. Instead, Beck offered $40,000. “You can imagine how blown away we were.”
But that $40,000 grew into $51,000 when the final proceeds were tallied from a home sale that Beck hosted in the run-up to his “America’s First Christmas” event in December 2010.
Beck money going to local organizations
Glenn Beck and his team of producers will donate $44,611 to five Clinton County organizations, following Beck’s December 2010 visit to the area.
City officials learned on Thursday that the Fox News personality would donate the net proceeds from his appearances to a handful of organizations, including the Clinton County Foundation, Sugartree Ministries and the Clinton County Youth Council.
Chris Schock, the director of the Clinton County Regional Planning Commission, said the $44,611 was money remaining “after [Beck] covered local fixed costs like paying the Murphy [Theatre] for rent, expenses, their portion of the ticket sales and paying the City of Wilmington $10,780.78, which covered all of the city’s additional expenses.”
The general fund of the Clinton County Foundation will receive $10,611, the Clinton County Youth Council (CCYC) and Energize Clinton County (ECC) will both receive $11,000, and Sugartree Ministries and the Clinton County Leadership Institute will receive $6,000, each.
Total Beck impact still being tallied
When Beck pledged to donate money to the city, his fans followed suit.
The Clinton County Foundation (CCF) received between $15,000 and $18,000 in donations during that time, according to Lori Williams, the foundation’s treasurer. Some of those were donated to specific causes like Little Hearts, Big Smiles or the Ho-Ho Shop, Williams said. One $10,000 donation was given to the foundation to be used at its discretion.
“It’s a little hard to know for sure [how much money was raised because of Beck], because not all of the checks were identified by the donors as such,” Williams said.
The money given explicitly to the foundation will be set aside in the group’s IC Clinton Fund, which is separate from the DHL fund that gets distributed to area non-profits each year, Williams said. Money in the IC Clinton Fund can be requested for donation by individual organizations.
An auction on the Murphy stage before Beck’s evening show on December 15 raised “a couple thousand dollars,” said auctioneer Gary Kersey. A portion of that money was given to the CCF and another portion to the theater.
For all the money they raised, Beck and his production team spent their fair share when they were in town. They rented 12 rooms at the General Denver Hotel on December 14, ordered pizzas by the dozen from Generations and visited a handful of other local restaurants.
Wow. I can't believe Beck and his listeners went to Wilmington and gave thousands of dollars. What hatemongers.
Sugar Creek Ministries is the soup kitchen, one of those councils is just a prayer group... The most generous thing he did was donate that money to the Murphy. Everything else he did, the thousands of dollars, was collected by the very people he charged in Wilmington to meet him and talk. He was basically charging people to save their own town and taking credit for it...