And the Raffle Winner is….

Good Morning Everyone!  We have been the promotional partner with Island Green Living Association over the past month in an effort to promote ticket sales for their “Two Tickets to Paradise” fundraiser.  If you have been following along, you know how amazing this prize package is and that one lucky winner will be taking an all expenses paid trip to St. John that includes airfare, excursions, dining and accommodations!  Well, after cooperatively raising $112,000 in support of sustainability efforts on St. John, a winner has been announced!

At 5PM on Wednesday, May 5, Island Green drew a winner from the thousands of raffle tickets that were purchased. And the winners are….

Tom and Elizabeth Rex!

Tom and Elizabeth bought ONE raffle ticket on DAY ONE of the contest and are over the moon excited about their luck!  In an email to Kelly McKinney Lawson, Executive Director of Island Green, Tom wrote, “Beth and I are definitely on Cloud 9….would be Cloud 10 or 11 at least, if there was such a thing! We are greatly appreciative of this incredible opportunity.”

In this email, Tom also pondered their love for St. John and reminisced about their first time visiting Love City…

We have been coming to St John every year since 2014 (2020 excluded of course). We absolutely love it. Our first year, we were actually staying at Sapphire Beach on St Thomas. While talking to a couple at the pool, they said “you have to go to St John”. They suggested the all day pass at Honeymoon Beach, which we did, after we hiked Caneel Hill. What a great first day!

And, like many of you, that was it for the Rex’s…they have been annually visiting us ever since.  We, collectively, want to extend a huge congratulations to Tom and Beth…I personally look very forward to meeting you two when you join us for our donated sunset sail on Asante 🙂

Island Green would also like to thank all of the businesses who donated to this contest in support of their initiative.  The following list of local vendors will be contributing to Tom and Beth’s dream vacation!

• Gallows Point Resort
• The Terrace Restaurant
• Colombo’s Smoothies
• Oceans 362
• Morgan’s Mango
• Lime Out
• Salt Deck
• Lovango Resort + Beach Club
• Kekoa
• Sailing Asante

To those of you who are not super excited about the outcome of this contest, let’s take a moment to check out where your donated dollars will make an impact!  Many of you had never heard of Island Green prior to our promotion of their fundraiser.  This is an organization whose mission I have always felt very strongly about…As I have mentioned in past posts, St. John has come A LONG way in the past decade in regards to green initiatives and sustainability in an effort to preserve our paradise.

And much of that is thanks to Island Green.  Tom writes that he had never heard of them before this contest and is now looking forward to their email updates.

We were not aware of Island Green until reading about it in The News of St. John. We definitely believe in your program and were glad to buy a raffle ticket. That worked out pretty well for us, now didn’t it? :). Seriously, we had wondered about recycling for a few years now. Very glad to see your emphasis there. Limiting plastic is a great initiative as well, and we are all in on reef safe sunscreen too.

I hope that many of you are doing the same and will now be following along about how you can participate in keeping St. John beautiful on your future visits.  The following programs gain financial support in the future because of your generosity:

• Expanding hours at the ReSource Depot – creating new jobs!
• Continuing support and education for a Plastic Free St. John
• Storm Water Management Programs
• Continuing Reef Safe Sunscreen education and awareness  Spreading the word that toxic sunscreen is ILLEGAL in the USVI!
• Expanding the current Recycling Program – perhaps plastics and glass could be on the horizon?!?
• Expanding composting program in an effort to provide mulch for community agriculture

I want to personally thank all of you for following along and supporting this fundraiser.  And a BIG THANKS goes out to Kelly and Island Green Living Association for giving News of St. John the honor of being their promotional partner for this contest and for all that they that do for the beauty-ment of St. John.  For more information on Island Green and their programs, please visit their website or stop by the recycling center and/or ReSource Depot on your next visit!

Oh, and on a not-so-positive note, some readers reached out to me via Instagram this week that they had been receiving DM’s from a page using our logo and newsofstjohn.explore as the tag.  This is NOT us.  Please do not respond to or follow this page!  We will never send offers to you via private messages on Facebook or Instagram.  We send email updates….We do not send messages via FB or Insta unless you sent a message first…Then I always try to respond in a timely manner 🙂   So, if you received a request from a bogus looking page with our logo, please report and block it!  It looks like this….

 

Our actual page looks like this:

 

 

Thank your so much to the readers who sent out a personal message in regards to this issue!  It appears the page has already been taken down.  I’d like to reiterate that we were NOT hacked.  This is simply someone creating a fake profile and posing as News of St John.  So, if you see something suspicious…Now you know what to do 🙂