Room-raising donations keep building

Two substantial donations to the community's elementary school room-raising project have supercharged the fund-raising drive. Hap Taylor & Sons donated one hundred tons of asphalt, and the Redmond-Sisters United Way gave $4,000 in cash.

The retail value of Hap Taylor & Sons' donation is about $3,000. The company also sold an additional 300 tons of asphalt to the project at their cost.

"We are part of Sisters and want to show that we are good neighbors," Hap Taylor said. "We enjoy Sisters, and Sisters has been good to us. This is just our way of saying 'thank-you.'"

The Redmond-Sisters United Way is an independent organization not part of the Deschutes United Way in Bend.

Ken Johnson, president of the board, explained, "Usually funding goes into programs that help people in North Deschutes County through a regular budget scenario. But in the last 13 years in a row we have managed to exceed this goal by a little bit each year, and we use the extra money to fund special grants."

Johnson noted that Redmond-Sisters United Way contributed to the SOAR program a few years ago.

According to Johnson, there is a possibility of an additional $1,000 contribution after United Way's fall fund-raising drive, "depending on how the drive goes this year."

Johnson said there were special reasons for the decision to fund the room-raising project. He lauded the "extremely strong, phenomenal community support that the program obviously has," and noted that the Redmond-Sisters United Way does not receive many requests directly from Sisters.