THAYER COUNTY - Tuesday served as the kickoff for Big Give Thayer County, the county's annual fundraiser. They reported a record number of donations last year, but the fourth year of the initiative is functioning a bit differently than the first three. 

The 2025 edition of Big Give Thayer County began November 18, and will run through December 2 - coinciding with Giving Tuesday around the country. Like other events with similar structures and focuses around the area, this county-wide initiative pulls together more than a dozen fundraising projects with their own individual objectives and goals and provides them all with one unified base of operations to market themselves from.

"I call it our Super Bowl. It's when we're all telling the story, marketing, saying we are thriving down here in Thayer County," said Carley Bruning, executive director of the Thayer County Economic Development Alliance. "It helps us market our community. It helps us remind people of where they came from, their hometowns. I always say the cavalry's not coming to save us, so we need to start investing in ourselves."

"A rising tide lifts all boats. So if one of our communities is thriving, that automatically helps the surrounding communities," said Paige Hansen, TCEDA's community coordinator. "You might go to one community for lunch and then stop at the other community to play at the park. Or we just want to drive our communities to grow because that helps all of the communities around it."

Previous versions of the event have culminated in one final in-person day of donations, but some structural changes at organizational partners like the county's hospital have forced the fundraiser to move entirely online this year. Now, along with other smaller local entities such as the Deshler Community Fund, the Thayer County Economic Development Alliance is assuming a larger role in the operation.

As they workshop more permanent plans for the fifth year of the fundraiser and beyond, Bruning said that developing a temporary stopgap solution was critically important so the progress made over the first three years of the event wasn't lost. 

"We didn't have an entity that could receive all the donations and then turn around and kick back those donations to those entities because of the things that were set in time with the creation of all these other entities," she outlined. "Our hope is to have an entity created that will be able to take this on, for sustainability efforts, moving five years, 10 years, 15 years down the line. We've hit roadblocks and challenges and now we're structuring to create solutions for the longevity of this event."

Even though the structure of the event has changed for this year, the goal remains the same: support the local community.

"The whole point Big Give is to get people here, get them giving, no matter what the the dollar amount they're able to give," Hansen said.

"You don't have to give big, you just have to give. That's all we're asking," Bruning echoed. "Every amount counts, especially for these nonprofits. When we had some online options, we saw for a lot of people that had donated, this was their hometown or their home county - they had ties, but they didn't necessarily live here. If we had not had an event like this and marketing it and giving them a link to click on and donate, they would never know really what we were doing down here."

TCEDA reported that even though less money was donated to Big Give Thayer County last year than in the previous two years, due largely to challenging external economic factors, more people donated than ever before, an encouraging sign for the future.

This year's event is seeking to raise awareness of and funding for about 15 nonprofits from across Thayer County. That includes dreams like pickle ball courts in Deshler, a gym in Belvidere, a playground in Gilead, and other more regional efforts headquartered in Hebron. 

"It can help certain projects gain more momentum if someone's already there on the page, because they know that the fund from their town is doing this big give, then maybe they see another project that they're like, Oh, I actually went to school in Bruning. I think I'll donate to that fund as well. There's lots of synergy," Hansen said. 

"We've had somebody that said, like, I got on there to donate to a certain fund but I saw that there was a library on there, so I donated anyway to them too. That's the goal, it's those little success stories that are behind the scenes that really fuel our fire and the passion behind it," Bruning said. "Economic development normally doesn't take a major role in this, but we find it very, very important for us to create the future in the communities that we want for our children and generations to come."

You can find more information about the fundraiser, including how to donate and descriptions of all the organizations involved, online.