Melbourne couple win Mazda CX-5 in Echuca-Moama Girls Night Out raffle

Debbie and Gary England from Carrum Downs bought their ticket at MBC before coronavirus shut the club down – they paid $50 to purchase ticket number 50.

Their name was drawn by Echuca Mazda dealer principal Garet Stobaus, whose company provided the car, which was purchased by Moama Bowling Club and donated to GNO.

“We have a long association with the Blokes Biggest Lunch so it seemed a logical step for us to also get involved with the girls,” Garet said.

“We have really enjoyed our first year with the committee and would like to congratulate them on a pretty stunning result in these troubled times,” he said.

MBC sales and marketing manager George Santos said the club had been supporting GNO since its inception in 2008.

He said the committee’s annual fundraiser has traditionally been a function at MBC – normally attracting between 350 and 400 women.

“It was such a bonus this year also included a major raffle; with the Mazda CX-5 such a spectacular prize,” George said.

“Even then I found it hard to imagine the girls selling all 1000 tickets at $50 a pop because everything and everyone has been so enormously impacted by coronavirus,” he added.

“But once again Echuca-Moama has risen to the occasion and now an urgently needed $50,000 has gone to the Echuca Regional Health oncology support fund.”

GNO committee member Leonie Canham said they were so reluctant to reach out to the wider community because they know how hard the past two months have been for everyone.

But in the end the committee knew how important the money was.

“So we turned to the sisterhood and the response was so overwhelming, so important and so humbling,” Leonie said.

“Girls Night Out was established in 2008 for one mission – to provide a flexible cash reserve to help people touched by cancer if they needed some kind of urgent financial support,” she said.

“We cannot thank people enough for getting us to the $50,000 mark; it will mean so much to so many.”