Mount Baker Secondary’s class of 2004 is approaching 10 years since its graduation and for many that means it’s time for a reunion.
A banquet dinner has been planned for June 21, the only stipulation being that tickets for the event need to be sold by April 30. That leaves less than a week to go.
Logan Volkers, a member of the class and organizer of the event, said the reception has been good.
“People overall have been really positive about the event,” Volkers said. “People that I talk to, they’re super stoked about it, they really want to go. They’re taking the time off work. The weird thing is just getting people to put their money in to buy a ticket.”
They are hoping to raise $2,000, which Volkers said was enough to have a buffet and rent out the Prestige and make that all happen. That amounts to 50 tickets at $40 each.
Volkers said the very first day they sold a bunch a tickets, but then things slowed down for a few weeks. He is expecting and hoping for a big rush for tickets in the last leg.
It’s a similar pattern to what he saw three years ago when he ran the graduation for the engineering student society at UVIC.
“It was the same thing,” he said. “It was within the last day that we sold 80 per cent of our tickets.”
He said they looked at what had happened at other graduating classes and statistically 20 per cent of the class will come back for the reunion. So they budgeted for 50 people.
Volkers moved to Victoria and hasn’t been back to Cranbrook in a few years.
“I haven’t really had a chance to catch up with people in town,” he said. “So I have a personal vested interest in wanting to reconnect with people.”
He said he’s been talking to a lot of people about their high school reunions and he’s found some common threads. One is that many didn’t know about their own reunion and so missed it.
“I know that the graduating class of 2003, they tried to organize a reunion for last year,” he said. “More or less they planned something, they booked something and then a lot of people didn’t find out about it until is was too late.”
Only a couple people went and it was not what it could have been. The organizers also ended up being out thousands, he said.
Volkers noted that’s why his group went with Indiegogo, because everything is transparent in regards to how many have bought tickets and where the funding is at.
In the worst case scenario, in which they don’t get to the $2,000 funding goal, he said there would still be a pared down event.
“There’s been so much interest from town and out of town, so many people have taken the time off to go, that we’re going to see what happens,” he said. “We will do a reunion, it’s just likely that we will do something small like a barbecue in someone’s yard. We just can’t afford to do a banquet-y type event unless we sell all the tickets by the April 30 deadline.”
If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, contact Volkers through the page at www.indiegogo.com/projects/cranbrook-class-of-04-reunion-june-21-2014. If you’re a part of the class of 2004, head online to buy a ticket.
