SGB Support Resources

The Sauerkraut German Band plays concerts, private parties, and many other engagements for the purpose of raising money for charity's sake.  To date we have distributed over $100,000 to various people, groups, and organizations in an effort to aid those of us that have needs greater than ours and little means to secure the extra financial backing needed.

To that end the SGB would like you to know that we could use any help which might be given to support our effort.  How can individuals help us?  We find a need for the following areas we perform in, each of which donated items can be directly deducted from IRS obligations.

The first area is that of time.  We have to book our engagements with different organizations ranging from the Clifton Opera House Association to the Covington, KY Main Strasse Committee to the Dayton Art Institutes' Oktoberfest Committee.  Each of these organizations takes time and patience to contact and follow up to get a contract for performance.  We could use qualified personnel time to call/contact organizations, follow up with those groups, and get signed contracts from these efforts.  This is only one of many time consuming tasks for which you could help us help others.

The second area is to donate music scores.  We have hundreds of music scores that we select our repertoire from, but we don't have every piece of music written.  There are literally thousands of music titles from Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and other eastern European countries for which we have no musical scores, but we have requests for at many of our sessions.  If you have any musical scores that could be donated to the band we would be very appreciative.

The third area would be to donate your expertise.  What expertise?  We don't know what anyone person can do, but we could use a road manager to help us set up and take down our staging after our performances.  Sign making, carpentry, set/stage design and layout, sound technicians, skit writers, critical listening and evaluation of performance, and program development are among the many forms of expertise we could use.

The fourth, but not necessarily the last area would be financial support.  Currently we do all of the above as well as play the engagements while many of us hold down full time jobs.  Sometimes we could use funds to purchase additional music scores, but we don't because we try to save as much of our engagement donations for charitable contributions.  Likewise, we found some material and fabricated new stands recently for which a little outside expertise would have been welcome.  With a little extra money we could afford a little advertising or promotion through mailings or promotional signs.

To arrange a booking or obtain a demo tape contact Dick Ray band manager at 937-669-5051 or send an email to dickray1@woh.rr.com.