When lifelong friends Jill Kort and Becky Soto started the Valentine’s Day Red Velvet Cupcake Fundraiser, Kort said she had no idea it would have such lasting success.
Now in its 14th year, a crew of volunteers, including some of Kort’s family, gathered in the Oglethorpe County High School family and consumer science lab last week to bake thousands of cupcakes.
Using five ovens, the process has become an assembly line.
“It’s a great group,” said Jo Harrison, Kort’s mother. “When you’re that tired, and you baked for that long and produced that much, it’s important that you work harmoniously.”
Each of the nine ladies has their own station: sifting flour, mixing the batter, filling the batter trays, running the ovens and finally icing and crumbling each cupcake.
This year, they baked over 3,300 cupcakes, raising approximately $3,600, which Kort called a small year. All of the proceeds go to the CAYA House food pantry, CAYA’s scholarship, and a portion goes to Oglethorpe County’s Reach Scholarship.
“Overall, it’s a great time, there’s tons of laughter and fun. And then you look around and see what you did,” Harrison said.
To help the bake days run smoothly, Kort’s aunt, Jennie Sturgis, preps the majority of the icing days in advance.
“It takes me, I would say, four to five hours,” Sturgis said. “Because there’s a lot of things that have to be done, like unwrap the butter, unwrap all the cream cheese and all that, which is a pain.”
Producing thousands of cupcakes comes with other challenges, regardless of how much assistance there is in the kitchen. It’s hard to anticipate the amount of supplies needed.
“We have to cut off the ordering to make sure we have the supplies,” Kort said. “But sometimes we lose orders because of our cutoff.”
Shifting cupcake missions
Originally meant to raise funds for a breast cancer walk in Atlanta, the initiative — which started with full-sized cakes — transitioned to support other causes.
“The Red Velvet Fundraiser has been a fundraiser for something every year since then; we’ve only missed one year,” Kort said. “It has benefited our church, the youth group at our church, and then it went into soccer, wrestling, and then it was wrestling when my son started wrestling in ninth grade, we did all proceeds to the wrestling team.”
The fundraiser continued to support the Oglethorpe County Middle School and High School wrestling teams as Kort’s son, Austin, joined.
When Harrison and Kort saw the state of the wrestling team's uniforms, they knew they had to do something.
“The wrestling uniforms for the school were pathetic; they were basically rags,” Harrison said. “We said, we can make cupcakes and buy these uniforms, so we did.”
Then, their mission shifted. In 2023, a year after Kort’s son graduated, the leaders of the Carpenter’s House, which was originally a registered food bank, decided they didn’t want to continue.
“Before they completely dissolved it, they talked to us about it and said we’ll give you our resources, we’ll give you the building and the freezer if you guys want to continue it, and so that’s when me and Becky decided,” Kort said. “Once mine graduated, we just have this passion to fundraise, and we love our community, we love our hometown.”
The CAYA House, or Come As You Are House, is a food pantry in Lexington that helps low-income families with basic needs.
With money raised from initiatives including the cupcake fundraiser, CAYA helps families receive nutritional foods and goods throughout the month, and even emergency support when needed.
“In December, somebody said I know a person whose power is about to get shut off, and it’s going to cost $600,” Kort said. “And we go up and pay the power bill, and so there’s a lot of things we do in that realm that we have a lot more flexibility to do, than just a food bank.”
This year’s cupcake fundraiser will be another part of the next steps in CAYA’s mission.
“Our long-term goals are to continue to build our food pantry, our scholarship and our emergency funding,” Kort said. “This county isn’t short on need, so our big picture is as big as the need. We just need our fundraising and time commitments to align.”
