The Hundred-Dollar Habit Behind Del Webb's $17,058 Red Cross Check

On the morning of October 5, 2024, thirty local charities set up tables inside the clubhouse at Del Webb at Lake Oconee. There was a bake sale table run by the Culinary Interest Group, a raffle, lunch, and live music from a local band called Blended Paths. By the end of the day, the club had raised $17,058 for the American Red Cross to support Hurricane Helene disaster relief. Betty Aubin represented the giving circle that sponsored the event. Margaret Harker stood in for the Del Webb Culinary Group. Patti Duckworth, executive director of the Northeast Georgia Red Cross, accepted the check.

Most Del Webb residents already know this event as the Volunteer Expo, the annual gathering sponsored by a resident group called 100+ Who Care Del Webb Lake Oconee. What's less obvious, even to people who've lived here for years, is how a community built around pickleball courts and boat ramps ended up running one of Greene County's more efficient small-scale philanthropy engines, and why the model works precisely because it skips almost everything a typical charity gala requires.

Where the Name Comes From

The club takes its name from a national civic-giving format usually called "100 Who Care" or "100+ Who Care." The idea traveled from a handful of small towns into hundreds of chapters across the country: members commit to giving toward a shared pool on a recurring schedule, and the group decides together which local nonprofit receives the money that cycle. No auction. No venue rental. No caterer taking a cut before the cause sees a dollar.

At Del Webb, that structure plays out on a quarterly rhythm. Rather than one organization absorbing the entire calendar year's goodwill, the beneficiary rotates, which means four different causes get a turn instead of one gala winner take all.

Two Donations, Two Different Kinds of Need

The Red Cross check from October 2024 answered an emergency. Hurricane Helene had just moved through the region, and the club redirected its Expo proceeds toward disaster relief rather than its usual local slate.

By the first quarter of 2025, the rotation had shifted back to steady, ongoing local need. The group's Q1 2025 donation went to Neighbors Helping Neighbors, a 501(c)(3) founded in 2020 to serve residents of Greene and Putnam Counties. NHN describes its mission as a hand up, not a hand out, and its work centers on three things:

• One-time critical home repairs for residents who can't otherwise afford them
• Repairing or replacing a primary vehicle so a family doesn't lose its only way to work
• Beds for Kidz, a program that provides beds for children who don't have one of their own

Peter Carroll, Gary Richardson, Karen Gregg, and Holly McGuiness represented the giving circle at that handoff, alongside NHN's Rob Mitchell and Bob Massey. The contrast between the two donations says something about how the model is meant to work. It can pivot to a national disaster one quarter and fund a bed for a kid in Greensboro the next, without needing a different infrastructure for either.

The Rest of the Club Shows Up Too

None of this runs on one committee alone. The Culinary Interest Group baked and sold goods at the Expo. The Del Webb Culinary Group had its own table. Thirty outside charities and organizations, none of them Del Webb clubs themselves, came in to introduce their work to residents who might want to volunteer beyond writing a check.

That kind of cross-pollination is easier here than in most subdivisions because Del Webb already runs more than 75 clubs and interest groups, from book clubs to fishing tournaments to gardening societies, out of The Club at Lake Oconee, the community's 21,000-square-foot amenity center. The building has a ballroom and a catering kitchen built into its original design, which is the same room that turns into Expo headquarters once a year. The infrastructure built for pickleball leagues and sewing classes doubles, without much extra effort, into a venue for a charity event that outsiders travel in to attend.

A Rhythm That Keeps Repeating

The club's own newsletter page, hosted through the community's official site, shows a new edition posted as recently as this spring, which suggests the same quarterly cycle of meetings and giving has kept running. If the pattern holds the way it has in past years, residents should expect another Volunteer Expo to land on the fall calendar, with a new slate of thirty-some charities setting up tables and another quarterly beneficiary getting picked once the year turns over again.

What makes this worth understanding, if you already live inside the gates, isn't the total dollar figure in any single year. It's that a community organized primarily around leisure, golf carts, and lake access has also built a small, self-funded civic engine that answers to nobody but its own members. Nobody outside Del Webb decided that Hurricane Helene relief or a kid's first bed would get funded. A rotating group of neighbors did, one quarterly meeting at a time, with money that came entirely out of their own pockets.

If you want to see how that same rhythm shows up elsewhere in Lake Country, or you're just curious about the clubs and causes that give this stretch of Greene County its character, Luxury Lake Oconee Real Estate Group spends as much time paying attention to the clubhouse calendar as the market report.