La Grange's H Foundation Nominated for Classy Award for Goombay Bash

Fans of the annual Goombay Bash can help its organizers – the H Foundation – by voting for it in the final round of the Classy Awards.

Voting ends at midnight Thursday, July 26, in the Classy Award, the largest philanthropic award in the country, according to Mary Sanders, executive director of the H Foundation. The all-volunteer foundation's event was chosen by judges to be in top five in the category of Most Creative Fund-raiser in the Midwest region, said John Rot, president and one of the founders of the foundation that supports cancer research . The final winner is decided 50 percent by popular vote and 50 percent by a panel of three judges, he said.

Supporters can go to their www.goombaybash.com website, and click on “Vote for Us,” Rot said.

The awards are sponsored by the Stay Classy organization, which provides services for not-for-profits and started a national awards program for those groups, according to Rot.

The nomination is based on the annual Goombay Bash, scheduled this year for 5 p.m. to midnight Saturday, Aug. 11, in the grand ballroom of Chicago’s Navy Pier.  TIckets cost $125 per person and are available at the goombaybash  website or at Hortons, 60 S. LaGrange Road. For those who do not want to drive to Navy Pier, the foundation offers $5 bus round trips from La Grange. The foundation also is subsidizing valet parking at Navy Pier for $10.

Goombay is a Bahamian word for music and the drum  that creates it.

Event T-shirts are available at Q BBQ and the Hot Dog Company in La Grange and Tischlers in Brookfield.

Rot said the bash is, “modeled after the typical black-tie event,” but bash tickets cost at least half as much and the event  features a casual Caribbean party. Those attending dress in Hawaiian shirts, shorts or grass skirts. Food is a Caribbean buffet with a “huge” shrimp cocktail bar, he said.

Like black-tie events, the party has live auctions; silent auctions in which bidders could spend $20 to a few thousand; a live band; and dancing. A fireworks display also is planned.

The event draws 1,000 to 1,200 people every year. And the next year, they bring their friends,” Rot said. “People look forward to it and really want to come.”

When the foundation was started 12 years ago, Rot said, they set three main goals: anyone touched by cancer could participate; all the money raised goes directly to cancer research and not toward overhead, and the event was a party, a celebration.

The H in the foundation name stands for  Pam Herts, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in October 2000 and died in February 2001. “We were a bunch of friends from La Grange and business owners. Pam was a good friend of ours; she worked at Hortons with us,” said Rot, one of the owners of the downtown La Grange store. A hardware manager at the store also later died of cancer.

In 11 years of bashes, the foundation has raised $4 million, and the last two bashes each earned $500,000, he said.

The money raised goes for research at the cancer center at Northwestern University in Evanston. Researchers are able to use the donations as seed money to go for grants. One researcher in preserving a woman’s eggs before she undergoes radiation therapy or chemotherapy was able to use $25,000 from the foundation toward getting a $21 million federal grant, he said. Rot estimates the $4 million raised by the foundation has been turned into more than $30 million in research money.