65th annual Rotary Auction a team effort from start to finish

“Hockey sticks are now going for one dollar — that’s a great deal, folks. Even if you don’t need one, you may need a hockey stick more than you need a dollar,” said the auction announcer at the 65th annual Bainbridge Island Rotary Club Auction and Rummage Sale.

And why not, shoppers agreed — their dollar could come back to them through one of the many social services and grants the BI Rotary funds with auction dollars every year. And they’d still be up one hockey stick.

An estimate of nearly 10,000 people attended the auction and rummage sale July 12, purchasing donated goods — about 16,000 items. It’s the island’s largest event of the year, and requires an immense lift from over 2,000 volunteers helping with event coordination, management, distribution, vending, public safety and more.

Funding from the auction supports grants to local nonprofits and civic projects, scholarships for Kitsap students, humanitarian projects abroad, and other community supports. But the auction itself is a benefit: it’s one of the largest direct transfers of wealth in Washington, organizers said.

Every year, dozens of families come to the auction hoping to purchase needed items that would otherwise be out of reach at market rate: furniture and appliances for their homes, sports equipment for their children, automotive and mechanical parts, and kitchen supplies. Children who rely on the free and reduced lunch program during the school year are provided with two meals for free.

“I was the manager of the beds and mattresses department for a long time, and it’s a lot of work, but you see kids come in who you assume they’re sharing a bed with their siblings. And you get to watch a five-year-old girl select a princess bed, and she gets to pick her own out — her first bed all to herself, possibly ever,” said site manager Torin Larsen. “There’s nowhere else you can do that — not in Kitsap County, not in Washington.”

The impact of the auction is felt across the world, added auction director Phil Toohey. He is an advocate for public health and quality of life improvements in remote regions of Nepal, and one of his proudest moments as a Rotarian was when he attended the ribbon cutting of a hospital near Mt. Makalu in the Himalayas that was funded by the BI Rotary Auction.

“When I was standing on that stage saying to those people, ‘Your children are going to live,’ that was my most proud moment. We serve places that are woefully underserved — that still have a caste system,” said Toohey.

The sale, which takes place at Woodward Middle School, takes four days to set up, run and take down. Volunteers spend two days collecting, sorting and adding prices to items to sell, setting up the auction structure and preparing the space for a massive volume of people.

The scale is immense: the Rotary has three semi-trucks that contain just the auction supplies — 1,000 tables, chairs, pop-up tents and shades, boxes, trailers, carts, water bottle refill stations, monitors and cameras for safety; as well as gear for volunteers like high-visibility vests, walkie talkies, and coolers for food and beverage storage. Once the sale ends on Saturday, the volunteers take everything down in six hours.

“It’s controlled chaos,” said Todd Tinker, auction site manager. “The physical plan of the school is what it is, and we use every inch that we’re allocated.”

Tinker started working as a site manager for the Rotary in 2015. It’s the Rotary site manager’s job to create a layout for each of the departments, create traffic flows and coordinate volunteers, like setting up a small city in just a few days.

“This is like Brigadoon! Old friends get reacquainted, new people meet for the first time, kids fall in love — no one’s been born here yet, but it’s still early in the day,” chuckled Toohey.

This year, Bainbridge Prepares returned to provide traffic and safety coordination during the event.

Communication is a big element of safety at the auction and rummage sale: there isn’t a very strong cell service signal at Woodward Middle School in the first place, but even if there were, the sheer volume of people visiting would quickly overload the network, BP director Pascal Schuback explained.

To work around that, BP set up a temporary satellite internet service over the area that allowed shoppers to make phone calls, look up the value of items online, and send emails without clogging up the neighborhood network. Holding the auction at Woodward Middle School also comes with a security benefit, Schuback added, because the school’s Wifi already has guardrails that block non-school-approved websites, making it a secure channel to handle payment card transactions.