When former NASCAR driver and Wood Brothers Racing Senior Vice President Jon Wood decided to ask fans for donations to purchase tablets for a nursing home in his hometown of Stuart, Va., he didn’t expect quite the response he received. Wood wanted to donate the tablets to the nursing home to assist with non-contact visits between residents and their families while nursing homes across the US ban regular visits in an effort to protect their residents from the coronavirus pandemic.
To provide fans a way to donate to the cause, Wood set up an option to purchase $10 donations from the race team’s online store. Purchases of those $10 donations, then, poured in to add to an initial $1,500 contribution from the race team.
“I only anticipated buying about 10 [tablets],” Wood told NBC Sports. “I told Matt and he was good with it since he would be signing the ‘thank you’ notes. I set it at 200 donations [available] to begin with, and that lasted about five minutes. Bumped it to 500, and that lasted about an hour. I checked with Matt [DiBenedetto, Wood Brothers Racing driver] to make sure he was okay, and we bumped it to 1,000, and now it’s at 1,500, which is where I’ll leave it.”
Donors will receive a handwritten “thank you” note from Wood Brothers Racing driver Matt DiBenedetto and members of the Wood family.
By the time the fundraising effort concluded, $300,000 was raised — enough to purchase 200 tablets to sent to 10 to 15 facilities. Wood even lamented on social media difficulty in obtaining as many tablets as he had funds to purchase because of limits set by various retailers.
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