Charitable Gaming
Dear CS members,
Many of you may not be aware of how much the Country Shul benefits from the revenues of Charitable Gaming. Over the past few years we as an organization have relied heavily on these funds to support us financially to ensure we can continue to provide quality programming to our membership.
This past year has been very difficult and we have seen that many families cannot afford to contribute in a meaningful way and we are pleased to report that monthly revenues from gaming help with these financial shortfalls. Below you will find out a little more about this initiative.
Charitable Bingo & Gaming
In partnership with Ontario Lottery and Gaming, the OGCA helped introduce electronic games to more than 30 charitable bingo and gaming centres in more than 25 communities across the province. These centres still have traditional paper bingo play but now also have electronic touch screen paperless bingo as well as other electronic games for players to enjoy. Charitable groups receive a portion of the proceeds based on their participation and role in the centre.
Similar to licenced bingo, an organization must go through an eligibility assessment with their municipality in order participate and funds are monitored based on use of proceeds policies by the municipality. There are Policies and Standards for groups through a contractual relationship with OLG and OCGA.
The significant change in the cGaming model is with the roles of charities and volunteers. The volunteer friendly roles no longer include the handling of cash or selling of product as they do under traditional licenced bingo. Only two volunteers are required and assignment times (sessions) are only a mere two hours or so in length. These two key changes have been crucial to groups adjusting to current volunteer recruitment challenges.
Another key focus of cGaming is to promote and create awareness of this unique community partnership and the direct charitable benefit to the people in these communities. Through education and community support, the goal is to increase awareness and revenues for these much-needed programs and services.