“Coins for Cancer Care” to Benefit the Cancer Care Fund!

It will be sixteen years ago – on February 12^th, 2004 – when SCCCF kicked off the “Coins for Cancer Care” campaign! Despite the fact that we haven’t promoted this campaign much in re-CENT years, every year SCCCF receives a handful of “Coins for Cancer Care” coin boxes from those familiar with the campaign.

That got me thinking! Why not use the Indoor Row Group’s fundraising effort on February 12^th to resurrect this the profoundly simple but quite magnifi-CENT way for folks to show their support for SCCCF!

As many of you may be aware, I am a bit of a penny enthusiast. That being said, I truly wish I could take credit for the “Coins for Cancer Care” idea, which goes back, but I can’t. The idea belongs to Dr. Matthews. I still, rather vividly, recall walking past his office on a Monday morning when he called me in, “I have an idea to raise money for SCCCF,” he explained.

He had read an article over the weekend about the billions of dollars in loose coins that people have stashed away in sock drawers, coffee cans, piggy banks and car ash trays. “If we can just get people to donate these spare coins to the fund!” he mused.

We had several thousand “Coins for Cancer Care” coin boxes printed up... and several hundred of those boxes still remain!

At the time I was curious how much of the “billions of dollars” in loose change were pennies... so I did a bit of research which lead to what appears on one of the flaps of the box:

“With 280 million people living in the US and an estimated 130 billion pennies in circulation, there are about 462 pennies for every many, woman and child. If all 112,000 Sheboygan County residents donated just their share of pennies we could raise over $500,000.00 that would benefit local cancer patients.”

Well, we now have an estimated 325 million people living in the US and about 118,000 in Sheboygan County. I tried to find an estimate of how many pennies are in circulation, but it is a very difficult number to determine. So, instead, I simply looked at the number of pennies produced by the US Mint since 1992 (the year of my personal cancer diagnosis). Since 1992, there have been over 192 billion pennies produced. One would assume a large percentage of these coins are still in circulation or can be found in places like sock drawers, coffee cans, piggy banks and car ash trays... and couches, let’s not forget those couches! So, if you do the math (without considering the billions of pennies dated before 1992 that are still in circulation) there would be (at least) 593 pennies for every man, woman and child and if all 118,000 Sheboygan County residents donated just their pennies (we’ll certainly except your nickels, dimes, quarters, halves, dollar coins and currency as well) we could raise about $700,000 to benefit local cancer patients!

I appeal to your CENT-cere CENTS of generosity and request your com-PENNY in providing the e-CENT-ial funding through which SCCCF can continue to provide its CENT-sational services to magnifi-CENT cancer patients and survivors in our community! 😊