Last Remaining 'Fancy Division' Mummers Club Struggles For Survival
By Paul Kurtz
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- The sole remaining "Fancy Division" club among the Mummers' organizations in Philadelphia has turned to the Internet in a desperate attempt to stay afloat.
Inside the Golden Sunrise clubhouse, Palma Lucas is worried as she works on framing for the club's New Years Day float.
"We are scraping by this year," she said. "We will be able to do it with the help of all our members that we have here now, but we are looking at a very dim future."
She says that with city funding cutbacks over the last several years combined with a general decline in the economy, fundraising was getting harder and harder -- and coming up short.
So, Lucas says, Golden Sunrise has signed up with the crowdsourcing web site "IndieGoGo" in hopes of turning things around.
"One of our younger members came up with the idea and she set up our source -- and hopefully this will work," Lucas says. "We're hoping for at least 28 thousand (dollars)," she tells KYW Newsradio. "That will give us a guarantee for 2016."
As of this morning they'd raised a little over $600 -- not much, but there are still 54 days left until the fundraising deadline.