As Elbow Lake residents stepped up to support a community splash pad, Mayor Deb Hengel remembers one particular donation.
It’s never too early to have a giving heart.
Last summer, Elbow Lake Mayor Deb Hengel stood at an information booth surrounded by several small splash pools at the town’s annual Flekkefest celebration. She, along with other volunteers, was there to promote the city’s proposed splash pad and talk to residents about the fundraising effort.
A young boy approached the donation box. “We had the donation box there in case someone wanted to throw in something to help,” said Deb. “Then I remembered meeting him before.”
And what he did next is something she will always remember.
The previous fall, when this young boy was in fifth or sixth grade, Deb had a conversation with him while she was walking door-to-door in Elbow Lake, meeting people and listening to the concerns of people of all ages.
“I asked him, ‘Well, what do you think we need in Elbow Lake?'” Deb said. “He said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ And I said I bet you do, you got some ideas.”
Shyly, he said he heard Elbow Lake was getting a swimming pool. But he hadn’t heard about the splash pad, so he was curious about that decision.
Deb explained the reasoning, with the conversation circling around the pros and cons of a splash pad as opposed to building a swimming pool.
“I said we were going to do a splash pad because a swimming pool is just more costly. And you have to have lifeguards, and there’s a lot more liability,” she said. “I told him that with a splashpad you can have all the fun with less cost and hassles. And he thought that was okay.”
That meeting came back to Deb as she watched the young lad approach the donation box at Flekkefest with his grandmother.
He paused….he thrust his hand in his pocket…and pulled out a fistful of coins.
The sound of metal hit the donation box!
Today, when Deb reflects on how the community came together to raise over $80,000 for the project, she sees 63 cents in the total.
She likes to think that amount came from the pocket of that child.
“The lesson here is that philanthropy can start at any age,” she says. “Other people donated, and we had an anonymous donor give a lot. But there have been donations all the way down to 63 cents. The idea is that people give what they can. I could tell that boy felt good about putting that money in. And who knows what that money was supposed to be for when he was walking about Flekkefest. But it ended up helping something he believed in.”
The splash pad will open this summer!
