Note: It helps to click the “Publish” button when finished typing a post, not the “Save” button. Thus, this post is being back-dated to when I meant to publish it.

This weekend marked the second occurrence of the Firefighters Association of Nevada City’s Spaghetti Feed. This is one of two major fundraising events we hold every year, the other being the November Pancake Breakfast. This year was immensely more successful than last, in that we actually paid for the cost of the food we bought and made a few bucks.

Last year was an utter failure. We purchased far too many ingredients (we could have fed 500, we had less than 100 people actually show up), didn’t have much advertising and held the event on a day when there were several other major events going on around town. All these factors, combined with the fact that it was the first year and no one knew of the event, contributed to us actually spending money instead of making it. Being a mostly volunteer department with not nearly enough tax base to support our needs, fundraising is fairly essential. It has provided money to purchase equipment, outfit engines, build a new station and much more. You can imagine our disappointment when we loose money instead of making it.

It was quite refreshing this year when around 230 people showed up. We had a very good advertising campaign this time around (with five days of coverage in the newspaper), banners on two of the busiest streets in town, and a much better idea of what we were doing. All said and done, we managed to pull in somewhere north of $2,500 (minus food costs). While still not a tremendous amount considering the cost of what we want to purchase ($300,000 fire engine), its a start.

All of this required quite a bit of pre and post-event work, from cooking and cleaning the day before, to setup and tear down of tables, chairs, etc the day of. All in all it came off with no major issues, but as the title of this post indicates, it was one long weekend.