Time To Get Your Tickets For Charity Ball

By Editor | January 29, 2025 |

A Monthly Report
From The JA Of WV
By Katherine Montague

The Junior Auxiliary of Water Valley stays very busy this time of year. We wrapped up Project Santa at the end of December. This project involves connecting those who would like to provide Christmas presents to children in our community that would otherwise not receive them and coordination of delivery. Not much else that we do provides us with so much joy and fulfillment, so we were very pleased to ensure gifts for over a 100 kids this year in Water Valley and Coffeeville. We are so thankful to all of our individual donors and also to the employees of the Solero plant here in town who were able to donate gifts to 30 of the children on our list this year!

We also really enjoyed participating in the Magnolia Youth Sports League Soccer and Flag Football seasons. Through our Youth Sports project, the Junior Auxiliary of Water Valley has volunteer coaches and sponsors a team. Erin Dyer coached this soccer team.
Our Bundles of Love project is reaching 120 students at the schools in Water Valley and Coffeeville each week. We send home a grocery bag full of a meal and several snack to children experiencing food insecurity in the home. We are able to use the DES cafeteria for packing Bundles every two weeks, and we are able to send home a bundle with each student from school every Friday.

The Junior Auxiliary of Water Valley also enjoys administering the access to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library to children ages birth to five years old. This program is operated through the Dollywood Foundation, which provides an age-appropriate book mailed to each child’s home every single month from birth until they go to kindergarten.

We are currently serving 297 children in Yalobusha County through this program. If you have a child under the age of five that you would like to register to receive books, please visit www.imaginationlibrary.com to register.

Coming up in the next couple of weeks are two of our most fun events of the year! We are so pleased to host our annual Charity Ball from 7 to 11 p.m. on Feb. 8, at Fountain Square. The party this year is disco-themed, so grab your bell bottoms and sparkles for some serious disco fun! We have invited the Sam Mooney band to come down from Nashville to play for the party, and the food will be catered by Heath and Monique Horan.

Major thank-you to Liz Reynolds for letting us have this party at Fountain Square again and also to everyone who has already bought tickets to join us! Tickets are $50 each, or you can purchase a table for eight people for $500 or a table for 10 people for $600. To make a ticket purchase, please reach out to any Junior Auxiliary Member, through our facebook page, emailing juniorauxiliary.watervalley@gmail.com or just stop by Family Hairloom.

Along with the annual Charity Ball also comes our 2025 Silent Auction. This year’s auction will take place online at https://www.charityauctionstoday. com/bid/14176 and run online for the week leading up to the ball. The auction ends at 10 p.m. on February 8, the night of the Charity Ball. Be on the lookout for links to the auction through our Junior Auxiliary of Water Valley Facebook page, and we extend a huge thank-you to all of our local businesses that have donated the goodies for this year’s auction.

There are so many excellent items to bid on ranging from hotel stays in Oxford to delicious petit fours to a stained glass crappie, there is sure to be something for everyone and we would love for you to check it out.

Lastly, this year’s JA Trailblazer Color Run is scheduled for Saturday, March 1 at 8 a.m. This is a 5K Run and 3K Walk through the middle of Water Valley. Strollers and wagons are welcome! Registration starts at 7:30 a.m. at the Band Stand at Railroad Park on Railroad St. in downtown Water Valley. The run/walk starts at 8 a.m. at the entry of Railroad Park. The cost is $35 per participant and includes t-shirt and swag bag. Prizes will be awarded. Pay via PayPal/Venmo/Credit or Debit Card (3% convenience fee will apply), with check/cash to a JA member prior to the event, or with any of the options on the day of the event.

The site to register is https://forms.gle/iXwVUoz8coiemq459, and you must be registered by Feb. 9 to guarantee receiving a t-shirt. Registration is not complete until payment is received.

This is one of those runs where you wear all white and end up covered in fun blobs of every color of paint once you cross the finish line, so come join us to help raise money for all of our community projects and end up as a work of art!