A bunch of innocent people will be taken to “jail” today, to raise funds for the American Cancer Society.
The Starke County Relay for Life Lock In will take place this afternoon from 1:00 to 5:00 at the Knox VFW. “Essentially, people are going to be surrendering themselves to the VFW for a jail situation, I guess you could say,” explains Event Chair Ericka Taylor-Joseph. “They bring in their little warrant and they’ll be sentenced and then they will try and raise bail to get out. They can pretty much set their bail at whatever they would like. Some people are doing $100. Some are doing $250. Some are doing $500. And they want to try and get that bail before they leave.”
She says some prominent “inmates” will be featured during this afternoon’s event. “We’ll have the mayor and some vice principals and things like that from schools in the area,” Taylor-Joseph says. “So we would absolutely love for people to come out and support the event and to try and bail some people out or to surrender themselves, too. We’ll have fun games and food and things like that for people.”
The Lock In is one of several fundraisers the group holds throughout the year, leading up to the main Relay for Life event, in which teams of participants walk for 18 hours. Taylor-Joseph says the Relay for Life is something everyone should experience. “It’s supposed to simulate what a cancer patient goes through in their exhaustion and things like that, through that 18 hours,” she says. “You’re supposed to have one person from your team on the track the entire time, and we have games and all kinds of stuff going on the whole time, music playing. It’s a really fun time, but it’s also an emotional time because some people come there to grieve the loss of someone or to celebrate their survivor.”
In the end, she says the money raised from all these events is used to do some amazing things for cancer patients. “We raise funds all year long for things like cancer research, rides for people back and forth to treatment that they wouldn’t necessarily be able to get if they didn’t have that,” Taylor-Joseph says. “They buy wigs for people and things like that. There’s a myriad of skills that they do. Hope Lodge, if they’re going to be staying for treatment kind of far away, their family can stay there.”
This year’s Starke County Relay for Life will take place June 2 and 3 at the Starke County Fairgrounds in Hamlet.
