Feathering the nest
Plymouth Rotary Club Chicken Sunday serves up community success
The Rotary Club Foundation received a donation of $54,500 last week from the members of the Rotary Chicken Barbeque committee, the result of the annual Rotary Chicken Dinner served during the annual Plymouth Fall Festival in September.
The usual seven-member committee tasks of producing more than 8,500 dinners were handled this year by only three Rotarians: Todd Raska, Doug Willett and Bari Livsey who were responsible for the hundreds of hours necessary to coordinate, purchase and organize one of the largest and most labor-intensive traditions during the annual event. More than 700 volunteers helped prepare, grill, package and serve the dinners this year.
Through the foundation, the funds will be used for multiple community projects including scholarships for local students, educational efforts, community events and causes, beautification efforts and some world-wide projects including the eradication of polio and bringing fresh water to underserved countries. Recently, the club helped fund educational efforts in Ghana and several club members traveled at their own expense to build wells and schools in that country.
“Everything we do, the end goal is charity and donation,” Raska said.
Again, this year, the barbeque committee donated several dinners to the Cass Homeless Shelter in Detroit where 450 meals, three times each day are prepared, Raska explained that any unsold chicken dinners are divided by shelter workers and the various components used to make multiple meals.
The barbecue is older than the festival it anchors. The Rotary Club of Plymouth, founded March 7, 1924, began the event in 1956 to raise money for playground equipment, according to a recent local history of the barbecue. About 500 people attended that first year, and the club kept the tradition going. The Plymouth Fall Festival grew up around it, and the club’s sponsorship of the festival was promoted with a downtown street banner in 1960. The festival has grown exponentially as has the barbeque, historians noted.
Today the barbecue is one of the most popular features of the Fall Festival. The meal is still built around the club’s secret-recipe barbecued chicken, with corn on the cob, a roll, a cookie and a beverage. Volunteers cook the dinners over barbecue pits that Rotarians build each year from cement blocks, some of them several decades old, a reminder, organizers said, of the long history of helping the community through volunteer work of Rotary members.
