Raffle winner Irene with husband Dick holding their winners cheque outside the Royal Life Saving building
A special reunion for a lucky raffle winner
An old-fashioned chat at a shopping centre has led to a $15,000 raffle win for Irene of Alexander Heights. Royal Life Saving WA runs raffles right throughout the year to support our vital work to prevent drowning across our state, and Irene purchased her lucky winning ticket number 248023 in the most recent major raffle from one of our long-serving raffle sales staff, who will now forever be known as “Lucky Phil”!
Irene says she’s a regular raffle buyer. “We usually buy raffle tickets when one of the prizes is a car, so I decided to buy the ticket when I spoke to Phil at the stand and test my luck. As it turns out when we did win we decided to take the cash instead of the car though!”
It’s not the first time Irene has been lucky, but it’s certainly the best and most useful prize she’s ever won! “We buy raffle tickets from various organizations regularly and so far we’ve won a Fitbit which we didn’t know how to use, Bluetooth earphones, which we also didn’t know how to use so we gave them to our grandkids, and we just won 6 bottles of wine which we don’t drink, so this one tops all of that!”
Raffle seller, Phil, says it was fantastic to know he’d been part of Irene’s win! “I’d received an email from the office to let me know that I’d sold the winning ticket, but I was absolutely thrilled to see Irene when she came back to my stand and let me know. I’ve told a lot of people that I sold the winning ticket in the last raffle, it’s such a great feeling!”
Irene says when she received the call from our fundraising team to say she was the lucky winner she nearly deleted the number! “It was a missed call from a number I didn’t recognize, but then it said there was a message so I called back. When I got through to Royal Life Saving the person on the phone told me that I’d won either the car or the $15,000 cash and I was so excited! We really don’t know what we’ll do with the money at this stage. I guess we’ll give the kids some, but otherwise really not sure. I did buy a couple more tickets from Phil when I saw him at our local shopping centre though!”
Phil says encouraging people to buy raffle tickets to support Royal Life Saving is a real pleasure. “I’ve been working selling raffle tickets for Royal Life Saving for a couple of years now. I really enjoy building the rapport with people at the stand, and having a good chat. Everybody knows who Royal Life Saving is and it has an astounding reputation so it’s great to get to have a chat with people and sell the tickets the old-fashioned way.”
Royal Life Saving WA’s next major raffle will be drawn on Australia Day 2022, so why not become one of the first to purchase? You never know, you might just be our lucky winner next time around?
