This weekend, in St. Charles, Missouri, Shelly Kozicki will be hosting her 5th Annual “Quartermania. This year’s event, just like all previous ones, has completely sold out to a crowd looking forward to bidding, prizes, food and friendship.
If you’ve never attended a “Quartermania”, you may wonder just exactly what it might be. Basically, it’s a bidding contest in which you bid quarters on your favorite prizes (which you get to choose from a list of over a hundred). The game is fun because for as little as two quarters, or up to a maximum of eight quarters, you can win pretty much anything ranging from baseball tickets and restaurant gift certificates to week-long vacations. This year, available items include St. Louis Cardinals jerseys and 2013 tickets, $100 gift certificates to Macy’s, Saturday Night Live tickets, shatterproof and waterproof video cameras, LCD TV, Callaway Driver valued at $300.
This event generally attracts between 300-400 attendees annually, and their collective bids result in about $15,000 raised each year. Shelly works tirelessly for several months prior to the event, calling local and regional businesses, getting prizes from the auction, making the items look nice for the event, promoting the event and selling tickets, getting food and drink donated, and much (much!) more. But to Shelly, every minute spent working on Quartermania, is absolutely worth the end result.
Through Quartermanias and other fundraising efforts, Shelly has now raised nearly $250,000 for the Meso Foundation and its peer-reviewed mesothelioma research program. The dollars Shelly raised have already funded two mesothelioma research projects and she is now working on a third. One of these projects includes the study on “Targeting Mesothelin by Human Antibodies for Mesothelioma Treatment” conducted by Mitchell Ho, PhD, at the National Cancer Institute (NIH).
Shelly started fundraising in 2007. Tragically, she lost her husband, Craig, to mesothelioma in 2009, but she never stopped believing that a cure is possible. Nowadays, she dedicates her events to Craig’s memory and is inspired to continue her work by so many friends affected by mesothelioma whom she met through her events and the Meso Foundation. As she will tell you this Saturday, there is much more work to be done and she won’t be stopping until there is a cure. To support Shelly’s fundraising efforts, click here to make a donation.
