Ruth Weintraub, a supervisor on the Peoples Gas damage prevention team, has climbed mountains, scuba-dived, flown planes and waterskied. So, when she got a chance to rappel of the 17-story Hilton Tampa Downtown—that’s a height of about 184 feet—she said, “I want to do that!”
The event, appropriately named Over the Edge, was a fundraiser and awareness booster for Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay, to help increase visibility for its one-to-one mentor program.
Weintraub had been a mentor through the nonprofit to an 11-year-old girl named Angel and her siblings, who were growing up in a desperate environment in a high-crime, low-income neighborhood with a single mother.
“It was a lot about teaching her things, like personal grooming, how to go shopping or to the mall, or coming to my house to cook,” Weintraub said. “Just getting her out of that environment to go to the zoo or park or beach or anything that was different, to show her that there was another world out there besides the one she was living.”
Weintraub lost touch with Angel when she briefly moved from Tampa, Florida, for another job. So, it was serendipitous that the opportunity to raise awareness for BBBS came up. To qualify for one of the 42 rappelling spots, Weintraub participated in a fundraising effort, a raffle. She got the call that she’d won her spot because the organizer “said, ‘I kept pulling names,’ and they didn’t want to do it, until I finally drew your name,” Weintraub said with a laugh.
She added, “The rappelling was great, but I would have donated anyway.”
As part of the event, BBBS asked Weintraub a little about herself. Because she was going to discuss her job in damage prevention and safety, including calling 811 before digging, she gave Peoples Gas’ marketing and communications department a heads-up. That call turned into a story shared with the public on the company’s Facebook page and with employees through the company’s internal channels. Weintraub shared the story on her personal page, as did her neighborhood, along with friends and family. “It just snowballed from there,” she said. “Everybody just kept sharing it,” promoting BBBS’ mission and the important message of safe digging.
The day of the event, onlookers might have mistaken Weintraub for a certain wall-climbing superhero as she joyfully jumped and swung her way down the side of the hotel.
“It seems like sometimes we get really busy and we can’t donate our time, but there are ways we can bring awareness to groups like this,” she said. “Maybe we can’t give personal time, but when we participate by donating money or attending events like this, and we share it on social media, it brings a lot of awareness. Other people who may not know these programs are out there can take advantage of them either because they need the services or they may have time to volunteer.”