For the 10th consecutive year, the Rotary Club of Tucson will rev its fundraising engine to benefit local charities at the annual Tucson Classics Car Show.
The event, the theme of which is “It’s a 10,” is Oct. 15 at The Gregory School, 3231 N. Craycroft Road.
“We have wonderful sponsors again and car registrations are going faster than ever,” said Steve Pickering, chairman of the event that will showcase more than 420 classics and future classics, foreign and specialty cars, street rods and trucks and antique motorcycles. “Each year it seems like people recognize that this is the premier car show in Arizona and they don’t want to miss out.”
Tucson Classics has been a windfall for local nonprofits. In the past decade, the Tucson Rotary Club Foundation has gifted more than $876,000 to organizations such as Reading Seed; YWCA Women’s Center for Economic Opportunity; Imago Dei Middle School; Casa de la Luz Foundation to provide supplemental care for indigent hospice patients and many other charities.
Beneficiaries of the 2016 event include Youth On Their Own; Pima County Joint Technical Education District, which provides career and technical programs for high school students; GAP Ministries Culinary Program for chef training; The Haven, which provides outpatient and residential drug and alcohol treatment programs for women; and an assortment of other charities.
The primary beneficiary for the next five years is Make Way for Books, which seeks to create a culture of literacy in Southern Arizona by working with children from birth to age 5 and their families to increase children’s readiness to read and learn as they enter school.
The Rotary Club of Tucson has pledged about 40 percent of net proceeds from the 2016 show — which in 2015 totaled more than $50,000 — to the Make Way for Books Cover to Cover program.
Cover to Cover features a book bus equipped with free books and learning materials that hosts weekly learning sessions in neighborhood parks, food banks, mobile home parks, community centers, swap meets and high-need locations. The program serves about 6,000 children and their families annually; the Rotary funds will facilitate service for an additional 1,500 children each year.
“This is one of our most innovative strategies to reach kids who don’t have access to preschool or child care, so it is really meeting an unmet need. The idea is to turn the community into a classroom where parents and kids learn together,” said Jenny Volpe, executive director for Make Way for Books.
Volpe said the program seeks to help parents become their children’s first teachers, which is essential since four out of five local children don’t have access to preschool.
“In Tucson, only 16 percent of kids are in high-quality preschool environments like Head Start. The reason our community has such problems with reading is because when children don’t have access to quality preschool they start school behind in early literacy and other kindergarten readiness skills,” Volpe said.
Volpe said the program benefits parents as well; 98 percent of participating parents reported an improvement in confidence and literacy and language development skills.
“We work with lots of parents who have struggled in some cases with literacy themselves and teach them that even if reading isn’t their strongest point they still have the skills to help their children succeed,” she said.
Building stronger, more productive communities and enriching quality of life is central to the mission of Rotary International, which espouses “service above self” in its 1.2 million members worldwide.
Rotarian service and fundraising efforts are made possible through countless hours of work by a diverse, talented group of people who work in concert with generous individuals and businesses, according to Pickering.
“On the day of the show, we have 670 volunteers and 20,000 people coming to the show and more than 420 classic cars. It is a lot of people coming together to do exceptional work,” he said.
