Hospice Niagara launches Mega 50/50 lottery to support palliative care
Hospice Niagara has unveiled a new fundraising initiative, the Niagara Mega 50/50 lottery, aimed at enhancing support for palliative care services across the region.
Building upon the legacy of the former 5 Car Draw, Mega 50/50 offers ticket holders more frequent draws and larger prizes. Tickets are available on the Mega 50/50
website
.
'Every ticket helps Hospice Niagara continue to provide compassionate care, completely free of charge, to people and families across Niagara,' said Alicia Merry, director of marketing and fund development.
Ticket bundles range from $20 for a single entry to $175 for 500 tickets, a pricing option inspired by the 5 Car Draw. Once a ticket is purchased, it is entered into all remaining draws even if the buyer has already won.
Early bird draws for $10,000 in cash are on May 27, June 24, July 22 and Aug. 19. A grand prize draw for a 2025 Chevrolet Silverado is on Sept. 9, followed by a final jackpot draw on Sept. 12.
The 5 Car Draw, which ran for 16 years, was a significant fundraiser for Hospice Niagara. In its final year, the draw offered more than $242,000 in prizes, including five new vehicles.
Money raised by Mega 50/50 will support essential hospice programs, including in-home palliative care, emotional and medical support at the end of life and grief counselling for all ages.
Hospice Niagara operates a 10-bed residential hospice in St. Catharines and provides care for more than 1,400 patients annually. That reach is expected to grow significantly with the opening of two new hospice residences. Walker House in Welland is to open this fall, and Willson House in Fort Erie is planned for 2026.
'Play with purpose,' said Merry. 'Every ticket is a chance to win and a way to help people live well, no matter what life presents.'
More information about the fundraiser or ways to buy tickets can be found on the fundraiser
website
.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
10 hours ago
- CNBC
2025 CNBC Disruptor 50: How we chose companies on this year's list
The top five companies on the 2025 CNBC Disruptor 50 list — Anduril, OpenAI, Databricks, Anthropic and Canva — have a combined valuation of just under $500 billion. This is more than the combined total valuation of almost every past Disruptor 50 list of the last 12 years. OpenAI, the company that sparked a global arms race for new artificial intelligence capabilities, is the biggest contributor with its $300 billion value. But it is a race in which the other four companies in the top five (and more than two-thirds of the entire 2025 Disruptor 50) are very much key participants. The piles of cash amassed by these startups is characteristic of a new era of the Disruptor 50 list, an era that began with the 2023 list and very much continues, with the Disruptors using their cash piles to fund their own growth organically, and (notably) inorganically. Databricks has been especially acquisitive, spending billions of dollars to buy other companies in the past year. But valuation isn't everything. The eye-popping values attained by the top five companies on this year's list, and many others throughout the top 50, were technically less important factors in our ranking methodology than other measures of the companies' growth, scalability, and their overall promise to keep on disrupting in the years to come. Here's how we chose the 2025 Disruptor 50: All private, independently owned startup companies founded after Jan. 1, 2010, were eligible to be nominated for the Disruptor 50 list. Companies nominated were required to submit a detailed analysis, including key quantitative and qualitative information. Quantitative metrics included company-submitted data on their sales, number of users, employee growth (or lack therof), and more. Some of this information has been kept off the record and was used for scoring purposes only. CNBC also brought in data from a pair of outside partners — PitchBook, which provided data on fundraising, implied valuations and investor quality; and IBISWorld, whose database of industry reports we use to compare the companies based on the industries they are attempting to disrupt. CNBC's Disruptor 50 Advisory Board, a group of leading thinkers in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship from around the world, along with the newer Disruptor 50 VC Advisory Board, then ranked the quantitative criteria by importance and ability to disrupt established industries and public companies. This year, the two advisory boards found that scalability and user growth were the most important criteria, followed by sales growth and access to capital and community. New for 2025, we can compare the way the two different advisory boards considered the importance of the list criteria. While the two boards mostly agreed, the VC group thought that the size of the industry being disrupted was much more important than the academics did, with the latter ranking access to capital and community as more important criterion than the group that provides said access. The ranking model is complex enough to be sensitive to these differences of opinion, and perhaps more than ever, it makes good on the concept that companies must score highly on a wide range of criteria to make the final list. Nominated companies were also asked to submit important qualitative information about themselves, including descriptions of their core business model, ideal customers and recent company milestones. A team of CNBC editorial staff, including TV anchors, reporters and producers, and reporters and editors, along with many members of the Advisory Board, read the submissions and provided holistic qualitative assessments of each company. In addition, the VC Advisory Board assessed a small group of finalists as an additional component of the qualitative review. Specifically, we asked the VC group to assess some of the companies that would, if selected, be making the list for the first time, as well as to help in the consideration of high-scoring early stage firms, a group with lower valuations but promising business models poised for future growth. Importantly, these VCs were not permitted to provide an assessment of any company in their firm's own portfolios. In the final stage of the process, total qualitative scores were combined with a weighted quantitative score to determine which 50 companies made the list and in what order. The new generative AI era that began in 2023 has completely transformed the Disruptor 50 List. Twenty of this year's 50 companies have made the list for the first time, while another 19 were first-timers in either 2023 or 2024. Put another way, only 11 of the 2025 honorees are pre-ChatGPT CNBC Disruptors. But for most of that group (Anduril, Databricks, and Canva chief among them), the embrace of the new era is what has kept them here.
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Yahoo
ZRS Management hits 100,000 apartment units
This story was originally published on Multifamily Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Multifamily Dive newsletter. In early May, ZRS Management, the No. 13-ranked operator on the most recent National Multifamily Housing Council Top 50 list, surpassed 100,000 units under management. The Orlando, Florida-based company becomes the 13th firm to pass the 100,000 threshold, according to this year's NMHC annual rankings. ZRS had one of the largest jumps on this year's list, jumping six spots and gaining almost 15,000 apartments from the previous year. ZRS operates almost 350 properties in eight states and the District of Columbia. Over the past decade, its portfolio has grown by approximately 70,000 units — a more than 200% increase. Over the last few years, the multifamily industry has seen several third-party operators, including Atlanta-based RangeWater Real Estate, cross the 100,000-unit threshold, as historically high levels of apartments are delivered and consolidation has hit the management business. In 2020, seven operators claimed more than 100,000 units on the NMHC Top 50. In 2015, only four firms had passed that threshold. For many companies, growth has come through acquisitions or absorbing portfolios of operators who want to exit the management business. For example, in February 2024, Atlanta-based Wood Partners transferred property management operations to Charleston, South Carolina-based Greystar. However, ZRS has avoided making acquisitions and expanded as its clients grew. 'That's really been the most unique part,' President and CEO Darren Pierce, who stepped into the top role at ZRS in January, told Multifamily Dive. 'With the consolidation that's happened in our industry on the third-party side and a lot of groups doing it through acquisition, our growth as an entire organization from day one has always been organic.' Hitting the 100,000 threshold elevates ZRS to being more of a national property management brand. Pierce credits strong retention among its 2,100 employees with fueling the firm's growth. '[Getting to 100,000 units] solely was just a compounding of good behaviors, a compounding of good client relationships and investing in our employees,' Pierce said. 'It's deal after deal coming in and being rewarded by the confidence from all of our owners. It's definitely been a nice milestone.' Though the transaction market has been slower over the last few years, ZRS has picked up management contracts from new clients, some of whom are developers that are keeping projects longer than they anticipated. 'Our growth has been on transactions, and when transactions are happening in our business, we are rewarded by our clients buying new deals,' Pierce said. 'And so a lot of the growth has also come through management changes — companies that have retained their asset, refinanced their asset, and are looking for a new management partner.' ZRS could see its numbers increase or decrease as its clients buy and sell. 'As the market starts to loosen up and our clients start to sell, we could easily drop below 100,000 or pick up some more and exceed 100,000,' Pierce said. 'We've never measured our success by how many units we've managed.' Click here to sign up to receive multifamily and apartment news like this article in your inbox every weekday. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Analysis-Trump's vision for a twin-engine F-55 fighter jet faces reality check
By Mike Stone WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump's vision of a new, twin-engine version of Lockheed Martin's F-35 fighter jet may need to be scaled back due to cost and engineering realities, according to two people familiar with the matter. Speaking in Doha last month, Trump said the new "F-55" would feature "two engines and a super upgrade on the F-35." However, there is a caveat, with Trump saying, "if we get the right price." Trump was not shown a twin-engine redesign of the F-35, the two sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter. Developing such a jet would require an extensive overhaul, running into billions of dollars and taking years to complete, the sources said. Lockheed Martin had briefed Trump on a possible upgrade to the F-35 during multiple meetings before the Doha event, the people said. The proposal included just one "advanced" engine, a redesigned nose and forward fuselage, and a new sensor suite. Trump's reference to the "F-55" - the designator of the jet - caught officials and industry insiders off guard, particularly the mention of twin engines, a feature Trump has said he prefers for safety in case one engine fails. Lockheed is exploring the development of two new fighter jet variations, according to industry experts and the two sources. The proposed F-55 emerges against a backdrop of intensifying global competition in military aviation. China continues rapid development of its J-36 and J-50 stealth fighters, while Russia advances its Su-57 program despite economic constraints. After Doha, Lockheed acknowledged Trump's comments with measured enthusiasm, stating, "We thank President Trump for his support of the F-35 and F-22 and will continue to work closely with the Administration to realize its vision for air dominance." A Wall Street analyst tracking what might replace Lockheed Martin's F-35, said "it sounds like Trump has asked DoD to consider a twin-engine variant of the F-35 'if we get the right price,'" according to a note from TD Cowen. TWO ENGINES? Shifting the F-55 to two engines would initiate a costly and lengthy redesign of the F-35's airframe - and while it would make the jet fast, it would delay production by years, industry experts and one of the people said. Lockheed CEO James Taiclet had told investors in an April call that the company was exploring a "fifth-generation-plus" fighter concept that would apply technologies developed for its unsuccessful F-47 bid to enhance the F-35 platform. These new technologies would make it much harder to export the F-55, the people said, adding that they are still highly controlled. "We're basically going to take the chassis and turn it into a Ferrari," Taiclet told analysts in April, claiming such an approach could deliver 80% of next-generation capability at half the cost. Boeing beat out Lockheed to win the contract for Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD), now named the F-47 which will be America's first sixth-generation fighter and intended to replace Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor. PRODUCTION Because Lockheed lost the NGAD competition it is able to leverage its production plans for new jets. Lockheed had production spaces already lined up, the people said, and the president was made aware the company was poised to move ahead. "Lockheed is much further along than he realized," one of the people said. The timing of the F-55 announcement raises questions about how it fits into existing defense procurement plans and budgets. The Pentagon is already managing multiple high-cost aviation programs, including the ongoing F-35 program, the new F-47 development, and potentially the Navy's next generation carrier-based fighter jet - F/A-XX. For Lockheed Martin, the F-55 concept represents a critical opportunity to maintain relevance in the high-end fighter market after significant setbacks in next-generation competitions. Boeing's NGAD, which was just awarded and therefore is not in mass production yet, is expected to eclipse the F-22's capabilities, and so would F-55, the person said, making it a formidable fighter jet.
