Brandy Hale, Gilpin County.  Gilpin County High School students with the Interact Club are holding two fundraisers, one for the World Wildlife Fund, and another for POLIO Plus. Interact Club is a youth-oriented Rotary program encouraging “service above the self,” according to Rotary News online. The students have chosen to do a Pick-a-Pop campaign to raise money for POLIO Plus, an international campaign to eradicate polio, and also to provide immunizations for the most preventable deadly diseases. In addition, a penny war has been collecting coins and bills to raise money for the World Wildlife Fund, with the chance to be listed as a top campaign on the organization’s website.

For the past 13 years, the GPS Interact Club has been doing charitable works in connection with the Rotary Club. Teacher and club supervisor Curt Halstead says “Interact focuses a lot on fundraising. We do a local, national and international project every school year.

Many times, the local project turns into a community outreach event. Interact has volunteered in many hands-on community activities, like serving food at The Crossing, a transitional program for homeless people run by the Denver Rescue Mission, and landscaping around the school.”

This year the club’s participants include students Samantha Smith, Ashley Parkhurst, Alicia Johnson, Claire Diekman, Katelyn Armstrong, Halle and Anna Yocom, Sarah Trujillo, Katelyne O’Sullivan, Chad Holmes, Bailey Hobson-Kroll, Jessica Wilhelm, Nolan Lindberg, Stephen King, Blake Boulter and Reagan Schumaker. According to Rotary News online, these students are one of “20,372 Interact Clubs in 159 countries with 468,556 participants,” and “are connecting with world leaders, making a difference, discovering new cultures, becoming leaders and making friends around the world.”

The prospect of a polio-free world is very nearly in sight, with two of the three types considered eliminated, leaving only one type left that seems concentrated in Pakistan and Afghanistan, with threat of entering India. The Rotary Club has teamed with The World Health Organization, the CDC and Unicef to deliver vaccinations for the most preventable of diseases while working to eliminate polio once and for all, creating the Polio Plus campaign.

Contributions from the student body are encouraged with the chance to win a prize with the purchase of a sucker, depending on if the sucker purchased has a special marking on the handle. The World Wildlife Fund says such campaigns “will help WWF protect threatened species and wild places around the world”. The penny war is a classroom vs classroom competition to fill jars with pennies and bills, by putting silver coins in competing classroom jars. The classroom with the most money in pennies and bills wins a pizza party.

To contribute to the campaigns, checks can be made out to Gilpin Public Schools and either mailed or dropped at the front desk of the school.

(Originally published in the February 1, 2018, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)