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Giving hope through a love of coasters

2007-06-12

By Erik Yates: Last year a few members of IOACentral.com got together and did a good thing. We started Coasting For Kids....or more acurately, we continued Coasting For Kids. We started off by trying to do a marathon on Hulk....when that didnt pan out, we started doing volunteer work at a place called Give Kids The World. Its a great place for kids with Life Threatening Illnesses to forget about their worries and troubles.

It works on a completely volunteer basis, and depends on outside donations and volunteers to help keep the place running. Disney donates a lot of money and work to it, and so does Universal as they both worked together to build the Give Kids the World Village. Its kind of the starting point of IOACentral Radio......its where we all met, and found out we had a lot to say about parks and coasters.

That was just practice for our Marathon in which we raised over $3000 dollars for Make A Wish Foundation. We are eventually going to do it again, and we are going to do some more volunteer work for Give Kids the World Village....its a great place, and a great cause. And all of us who participated had never met before, but have since become the greatest of friends, with two of us actually embarking on a week long trip across the country together.....for IOACentral Radio related reasons, but still a year ago, we had never met each other.

The whole point is this:
One of our good friends in the coaster world, Mr. Clint Novak of In The Loop has started the Single Riders. Its an organization with the same goal as Coasting for Kids: Raise money and awareness for child organizations through our love of coasters, theme parks, and fun.

They are working together with Kennywood in PA to raise money for the Give Kids the World Village.

I am basically begging everyone to check it out, and if you can donate to a great cause. If you are in the area, and would like to help, there are ways for you to do that as well:
http://coastercrew.com/

Readers' Opinions

From Chris Wilkes on June 13, 2007 at 6:05 AM
This is great. I'll make a donation as soon as I get paid again. :)
From Greg Mills on June 14, 2007 at 3:27 AM
That's a really awesome and very sweet thing to do. When I can afford to, I'll give a donation to it. Just, at the moment, my funds are literally in the single-digit range until a couple weeks from now.

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