Giving to Gesu
Gesu's continued excellence depends greatly on your continued support. There are numerous ways in which you can support and participate in our fundraising efforts.
Make a Gift through an IRA Charitable Rollover
Normally, if you take a distribution from your IRA, this money is taxed as ordinary income. However, tax legislation enacted in October 2008 extends the opportunity for the remainder of 2009 for you to make a direct distribution from your IRA to a qualified charity, such as Gesu Parish (church or school), or other archdiocesan charities. Such qualified direct distributions to charity from your IRA are not subject to income tax. For more information about how you and the Church can benefit from an IRA charitable rollover, contact the parish office at (313) 862-4200, or the Archdiocese of Detroit Office of Planned Giving at (313) 883-8771.
Gesu Academic Learning Auction (G.A.L.A.)
The GALA program started in November, 2004 and continues to be held every Fall. The first event included a raffle and a silent auction that was open only to adults. Approximately $25,000.00 was realized from this initial event.
GALA has remarkably improved each year since inception. In 2007, the event did not have auction as a separate component. It was instead held as a side-event during the 2007 Gesu Christmas Show. The raffle generated $26,000.00, while the abbreviated silent auction netted approximately $1,300.00. An additional $2,000.00 was realized for classroom supplies by the teachers at Gesu.
Every year, each class makes a class project that is raffled off at this event. The money raised from these projects goes directly to classroom supplies for that class. Although we reach our goal this year (2007/2008), the changing economic times made it more difficult to sell raffle tickets.
Next year, we will have raffle tickets again. However, the tickets will be distributed at the beginning of the year and sold until mid October in order to avoid running into the Christmas rush. Additionally, we will add a new prize category. The new prize category will be for parents who sell tickets. For every $100 a parent sells, a ticket will be entered for them with a $500.00 prize! This will ensure that one of our parents wins at least one of the prizes.
In the coming year, the raffle ticket will remain $5.00 and we will have a penny drive to collect enough money to pay for our prizes. Parents can start saving pennies now to hand in at the beginning of the next school year.
Tuition Fundraising
Due to the disparity between the current actual cost of education per child ($5,873.00) and the current tuition per child ($4,200), we need to raise about $1,673 for each student.
Your help and participation in the annual raffle is very necessary and greatly appreciated. The advantage of selling raffle tickets is that every $5 ticket sold brings $5 to Gesu. Because of the penny drive, all the overhead for the raffle is met and each sale is complete profit for Gesu School. Please sell your allotment of tickets and if you can sell more, we would greatly appreciate it. The sale continues until the first week of December.