The Festival of Trees 2022 a success!

The Results are in from The Family Place's Festival of Trees 2022: in all they made nearly $47,000 dollars. It's the largest fundraiser of the year for the Family Place in Weyburn.

Executive Director with the Family Place, Dawn Gutzke, explains everything that went into making the event a success once again this year.

"The last two weeks have been absolutely amazing! We loved everything about Festival of Trees 2022! Great Plains Ford and all of their staff were just awesome to us! They helped us every step of the way, from setting up, to cheering us on through the auction, donating silent auction items, donating a beautiful tree, buying silent auction items and trees, buying cookies for all the children that came to the Festival and set up a Hot Chocolate bar - right to the clean up, they were right beside us!"

She elaborated on the tree auction and the record breaking silent auction numbers.

"Watching everyone who donated and set up their trees was so wonderful! They all took so much time and care for all their trees, each and every one were so special and beautiful! All the silent auction items were outstanding - a huge variety of items totaling a whopping 106 and brought in the largest amount in our silent auction to date! We also had a very large amount of people bidding this year too, we can't thank everyone enough for participating! The Tree auction was so exciting to watch all day. We had lots of returning bidders that continue to support us year after year and we had some new ones pop in too!"

Some of the highlights from the Festival of Trees included 50/50 winner Dennis Popowitz donating back the $225.50 he won, as well as the Weyburn Comprehensive School (WCS) tree receiving an anonymous top up bid of $1000.00 from a community member! They were so impressed with the youth of WCS creating a tree on such a deep life topic and making such an impact for the Weyburn community.

The Favorite Tree winner was a tie between the Weyburn Credit Union and CIBC. As well, the Favorite Silent Auction item was a handmade wooden birdhouse by Dennis LeClair. Tree number three was donated back from Ford to re-auction and offered to the next bidder, Jeff Tosczak. Jeff bid the tree for $2300.00 for his new Weyburn Dodge, making that the highest bid of the night.

Darren Borren donated both of his trees back and Minard's Leisure World bought five trees and donated the Miller's Movie Theatre tree back. Ford donated the ladder tree back and Annugas Compression donated $950.00 for a tree they bid on but didn't get it at the last minute - It was tree number 22.

All in all the Family Place's Festival of Trees event was a great success this year with a total of 25 trees adorning the showroom at Great Plains Ford.