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FRAMINGHAM – Years ago a group of community minded individuals worked with Selectmen to put together a creative application of the Boston Marathon “bibs”’provided to the then Town of Framingham .
Instead of merely awarding bibs to politically connected runners, they would be raffled off and the winners must work to raise funds for a Framingham non profit . Five non profits would also be selected by a random drawing from qualified applicants.
Over the years, I believe local non profits have collectively benefitted from hundreds of thousands of dollars raised by TEAM FRAMINGHAM runners. I’ve hosted several charities and their runners on “Fan to Fan” my sports themed interview show on Access Framingham TV .
However the widely heralded process has a few flaws as this year’s charity selection worked out.
One well supported local charity, Hoops and Homework, ran off with 9 of the 20 runners.
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As a regular donor and volunteer to Hoops and Homework, I was at first pleased to see the super large contingent of runners who selected this excellent program for mostly south Framingham kids .
However I was also disappointed to see one charity reap such a large commitment of the Team Framingham funds. I believe more than fifteen equally community beneficial raffle-losing charities were denied an opportunity. That’s too many! I strongly feel Team Framingham’s limit of only five winning charities is a gross unfairness to what is a community program.
Since Framingham has about 20 bibs, I believe, there should be more than five winning charities each year.
For example at least 10 winning charities should be a minimum to me. All winners should be guaranteed at least one runner with no charity allowed to have more than three. A charity should probably not be able to win more than two years in a row.
Team Framingham experts can play with the numbers, but the present process does disservice to a terrific program which I thought was to support Framingham charities.
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Team Framingham should release the names of the charities denied this year.
They might also share how many of the winners have won more than twice and if any of the losing charities have been denied multiple years without winning. Perhaps the Team Framingham’s listing of the names of the listing charities might inspire other non-Team Framingham runners to choose to work with them.
This great program and our community would benefit from these changes. The current imbalance needs to be fixed. Framingham’s many charities need improved access to this effort. I hope Team Framingham and our city leaders will consider this and promote a change for 2024.
David R. Hornfischer
Framingham
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