BELMAR — Pyanoe Plaza shined brightly last Saturday night as the annual Raising4 Christmas Light Show attracted hundreds of residents.
With a frigid wind blowing, residents all bundled up gathered in the plaza for this Christmas spectacular to begin. One young attendee, Jack Malloy, of Howell, said he was “super excited” to see the light show and the whole holiday season.
The show opened with a variety of carols in preparation for the main event.
As the carols concluded, the show officially began. With booming music, lasers and flamethrowers, the audience was treated to a stunning and free performance from the nonprofit.
Throughout the evening, volunteers from Raising4 walked around with buckets asking for donations for RallyCap sports, which many residents gave. RallyCap is a charity that provides recreational sports specifically designed for children and young adults with special needs.
Daniel Brateris, president of Raising4, told The Coast Star, “We realized we can do a lot of good with this. Over the years, it has kept growing and growing. We then formalized it by starting this nonprofit to be able to collect donations and give donations. We try to find good causes where we can take our talents and help do some good for the community and do some good with those organizations.”
Brian Brateris, co-founder of Raising4, said, “We had the idea of starting a charity that rescues other charities that have logistical problems. We had a bunch of buddies who were various specialists in engineering, law, accounting and all that, and we kept running across charities that had problems getting stuff done, but a good mission.”
He said, “Some would have a great mission, but they couldn’t run a fundraiser or they had trouble with a project, so we started this by just doing it by knowing people and jumping in and helping out.”
Eventually, the group would start to run the same fundraisers for the same organizations and they had a system that would help the charity out in the biggest and best ways possible. One of these projects would become the Christmas Light Show.
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