Jackson House Crisis Intervention Inc. raised over $50,000 for its charitable work from last month's Over the Edge fundraiser held in downtown Hot Springs.

Jackson House Executive Director Janie Smith said there are still some expenses the organization needs to deduct from the funds, but the total receipts were enough for her to plan a return of the fundraising event.

"Anytime you do something for the first time, you're going to have expenses that you won't make the second time," she said. "So some of those expenses we'll recoup when we do it again, some things that we had to pay for."

One example she noted was the big platform that went up from the roof of Dr. Daron Praetzel's building to the wall the participants came out over, Smith said.

"Now one end of the roof, you could have just gone right over, but that would have been into trees. So, you know, obviously, we didn't do that. So we did the side, but it has a wall that comes up about 12 feet off of the roof, so we had to have a platform built up to where they can go over."

Smith said many people who rappelled down the building, and many who were unable to participate, have asked if the event would return.

"I had folks that had never done anything like that before, most of them. and they would get over (and) almost panic," she said. "But every one of them told me when they got down to the bottom that they absolutely wanted to do it again."

Smith said several people called and said, "Hey, I want to do that. When are you doing it again? I just wasn't in town," so they are looking forward to doing it again.

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"It was an experience fundraiser instead of kind of the regular things that people do," she said. "This was a new thing, and it was a lot of fun."

While there was a pop-up rain shower on Sept. 24 that put a damper on the event, participants were still allowed to work their way down the building in the rain, stopping only when there was lightning in the area.

"The weather was perfect, other than it being hot," Smith said. "We did get rained on of all things. There was no forecast for that, but we had about a 20-minute rain, a good hard rain with thunder. We even had to completely stop, but we asked them, 'Do we stop?' and they said, 'No. We rappel in the rain.' And so once the thunder was timed out and off, then they continued and we finished in the rain."

In addition to those who helped raise money for the Jackson House, there were several "local celebrities" who got to rappel down the wall of the former Bank of America building at Exchange and Court streets. There were also several people in costumes as part of Spa-Con 6.0 who participated.

"We wanted to do a partnership; we liked the fact that there were other people downtown," Smith said. "And so we reached out to them, and they had several of their suited-up folks like Spider-Man and Superman and so forth that went over the edge to represent Spa-Con. And then we had some mascots from some of the high schools go over."

Some of the local celebrities included Mayor Pat McCabe, members of the Hot Springs Police Department, Hot Springs Fire Department, Garland County Sheriff's Office and Arkansas State Police.

"We really had a good time. It was a lot of fun, and the really neat thing is because this was the first time this has been held here," she said.

While a time and date has not been set for when the event will return to the Spa City, Smith said the organization is looking to possibly bring it back in March or later in the fall.

"I need to make a group call with the Over the Edge home office, and I've already messaged them that we want to do it again," she said. "And we just have to figure out when that's going to be. Part of what determined when we were going to do it here had to do with when they're available to come do it."

The organization only has so many experienced crews that do the actual on-site work, so "we had to work around their schedule as well as ours and the city's," she said.

"We were kind of doing that dance between what's going on downtown; we don't want to step on anybody's toes. But we ended up with good partnerships with the ... Big Steam Music Festival was going on and then Spa-Con. And we partnered with both of them and worked with both of them."

The funds will go into the organization's general coffers to help the people who come to the Jackson House for food or other aid, but Smith expects a majority of it to be spent on food.

"We have spent more on food this year than maybe ever," she said. "During COVID when we had to shut down the way that we did things, our in-person. We had to do everything over the phone; we had to do the no-contact delivery of things."

She said they continued to have "good donations coming in from restaurants and from grocers, and we were able to keep up with the rise in food requests because it was a huge jump in that of course. But with the inflation, it's kind of the dichotomy of why things happen -- the need goes up, but because of the costs going up, the donations go down.

"So that's made it exceptionally hard this year," she said.

Jackson House will once again be hosting the Dorothy Morris Thankful Gala on Nov. 19 at the Hamp Williams building.

Print Headline: WATCH: Jackson House raises more than $50K going Over the Edge

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