Cook-off kicks off United Way year

• By KORAN ADDO
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 18, 2008 - Page: 1B - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

The secret to making award-winning jambalaya apparently lies in the amount of meat added to the pot.

While some teams competing in the Capital Area United Way’s jambalaya cook-off haggled over which spices to use or how long to let the rice simmer, Barrett Jenkins’ Motiva Enterprises team won Thursday’s competition by “using lots of meat.”

“That’s the key,” Jenkins said. “Don’t spare the meat.”

The cook-off, part of the United Way’s annual fundraising campaign kickoff, netted the agency more than $9,300.

It’s unclear, however, if that figure will translate into a robust fundraising season for an agency that has experienced recent fundraising shortfalls.

The United Way raised just under $11.8 million in 2007 — not enough to prevent an average 25 percent cut in funding to its 49 member agencies effective July 1.

Campaign chairman Rolfe McCollister Jr. said this fundraising season, which runs from August through December, will be critical to how agencies provide services to people in need in 2009.

Donations have been lagging over the past several years, McCollister said, requiring the agency to dip into its reserves.

Now those reserves are basically dry, McCollister said.

“We need to make up the difference, because people’s needs are greater now than they have been in the past,” he said.

It’s not all doom and gloom for McCollister, who cited the generosity of people in the Baton Rouge area before the competition began.

“I’m confident we’ll rise to meet the challenge,” he said.

To help meet that challenge, the United Way recruited 32 teams from 31 companies to try their luck in enticing patrons to sample their version of jambalaya at $3 per plate.