Your Fundraising Dollars at Work
Did you know that by going to The Burning of Will Shuster’s Zozobra™, you are helping raise money for the children of our community?
Can’t come to Zozobra on Friday, August 29, 2025? We’ll miss you but don’t feel gloomy –– you can still help our historic tradition survive!
Your “I’m Not Coming So I’m Pitching In” $15 donation in place of a ticket purchase or your donation in any amount helps the Santa Fe Kiwanis keep this cherished event alive and funds programs that help our youth. That’s right, Zozobra is a local fundraising event in Santa Fe! After Zozobra pays all its bills, the net proceeds go to fund nonprofits that help our kids. And that $15 or more that you donate to Zozobra and our Santa Fe charity cause –– the same amount as a movie or two lattes –– means that our Kiwanis mission of helping kids dream, learn, grow, and thrive can continue.
Please consider pitching into this fundraising event in Santa Fe at this link to help Zozobra help kids. We’re counting on you. You’ll make your life less gloomy knowing that you made a child’s life brighter!
By supporting our charity activities in Santa Fe in monetary ways other than ticket sales, you will help us continue to bring Zozobra to you in your home for free.
Kiwanis is a global organization of volunteers dedicated to improving the world one child and one community at a time. For more than a century, Kiwanis has created opportunities for children to be curious, safe, and healthy regardless of the community in which they live. The Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe donated the net proceeds of the 2020 Burn My Gloom campaign to area nonprofits that help make life better for children, with 20% of the proceeds earmarked to help fund The Eliminate Project.
- Through The Eliminate Project, Kiwanis International and UNICEF joined forces to eliminate maternal and neonatal tetanus—a deadly disease that steals the lives of nearly 31,000 innocent babies and a significant number of women each year. The local Santa Fe fundraising Zozobra event has always been able to help a variety of charitable causes.
The 2023 Burning of Zozobra resulted in a transfer of Zozobra’s net proceeds to the Santa Fe Downtown Kiwanis Foundation to aid the children of Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico for education, health, and basic needs. The 2025 grant cycle provided grants in amounts up to $5,000 each to the following nonprofit organizations that help children enjoy a better future.
- Buddy Benches: Spearheaded by a request from 6-year-old Alyssa Kesler, Kiwanis is installing Buddy Benches in 18 Santa Fe Public Schools. “It’s a bench that people can sit at if they don’t have friends,” Alyssa said. The goal of the Buddy Bench, a nationwide initiative, is for kids to sit there and make a friend. After talking with her principal, counselor, and teacher, Alyssa raised funds for a buddy bench at her school and then presented the project in person to Kiwanis making it a broader reality.
- Cooking with Kids: Cooking with Kids partners with public schools to provide fun, positive experiences with nutritious foods to thousands of children in northern New Mexico. Research and years of experience show that when kids help prepare healthy foods, they are more likely to eat and enjoy them. CWK lessons also bring academic subjects to life, providing opportunities for kids to practice essential literacy and math skills and learn key concepts about health, science, geography, and social studies.
- Gerard’s House: A safe space for grieving children who have lost a parent or loved one, Gerard’s House provides ongoing Nuestra Jornada and Grief Connections groups support and a weekly grief support group on-site in Santa Fe Public Schools.
- Resolve Project PREPARE: Resolve’s mission is to keep our children safe and prevent violence by building skills and inspiring individuals to be agents of personal and community change. By reducing the fear and impact of violence, we help to create a community where people live powerfully, experience freedom, and pursue joy.
- Youth Shelters and Family Services: Street Outreach Program (SOP) provides street outreach services and a drop-in center for youth up to age 21 experiencing homelessness with survival supplies such as and serves as a place where youth can take a shower, have access to the internet, and receive case management services.
- Rio Arriba Imagination Library: The mission of the Rio Arriba Imagination Library (RAIL) is to promote reading readiness and language proficiency for the children of Rio Arriba County. Each child in our program receives a brand-new book mailed directly to their home, every month, FREE of charge until their 5th birthday.
- Communities in Schools of New Mexico: The mission of Communities In Schools of New Mexico (CISNM) is to surround students with a community of support, empowering them to stay in school and achieve in life. With full-time, majority bilingual (Spanish and English speaking), social work-trained Site Coordinators into high-poverty schools working with principals, teachers, school wellness teams, families, and youth-serving community partners to assess students’ and families’ needs and coordinate and deliver community-based support and resources.
- Santa Fe Children’s Museum: Title 1 schools serving communities and children living in areas with a high poverty rate pick a time to come visit the Museum for an all-access day. Children have free, supervised, reign over the Museum exhibits, including an imaginative play area, water exhibit, animal corner, and a newly renovated outdoor playscape, The Backyard, where kids can enjoy the outdoors, important for Title 1 schools that do not have access to green spaces.
- Solace Sexual Assult Services: Youth from marginalized communities are at increased risk for both sexual violence perpetration and victimization, used as tools to sustain power imbalances because of systemic oppression and the intergenerational trauma associated with it. Solace will use the funding to serve culturally specific populations, namely members of the Hispanic/Latinex community, through our middle school programming in the Santa Fe Public School District (SFPS).
- Sky Center Suicide Intervention Project: The Sky Center/New Mexico Suicide Intervention Project’s mission is to meet the challenge of youth suicide in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico, addressing the severe behavioral health crisis for youth and their families in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico through lasting solutions that encourage resiliency, courage, connection, and hope.
- Girls Inc. of Santa Fe: The Girls Inc. of Santa Fe (GISF) Mind+Body addresses girls’ mental and physical health by focusing on physical activity, body image, nutrition, and stress management. The girls learn about nutrition, exercise, and the consequences of alcohol and drug consumption while having fun trying a variety of physical activities and outdoor adventures
- NDI New Mexico (National Dance Institute): Founded with the knowledge that the arts have a unique power to engage and motivate children, the purpose of their distinctive programs is to help children develop discipline, a standard of excellence, and a belief in themselves that will carry over into all aspects of their lives. NDI targets youth living in communities with the fewest resources and provides programs that use innovative dance-based methodology to instill skills and behaviors for school and life success.
The 2022 Burning of Zozobra resulted in a transfer of Zozobra’s net proceeds to the Santa Fe Downtown Kiwanis Foundation to aid the children of Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico for education, health, and basic needs. The 2023 grant cycle provided grants in the amount of $5,000 each to the following nonprofit organizations that help children enjoy a better future.
- Girls Inc.: Funding will extend the Girls, Inc. Mind+Body program in 2024. addressing girls’ mental and physical health by focusing on physical activity, body image, nutrition, and stress management. Programming includes lessons about healthy sexuality, which begin with girls ages 6 to 8 who learn about human anatomy, physiology and hygiene, and continue with age-appropriate curricula about body image and healthy relationships as the girls move through elementary and middle school.
- Partners in Education: For over 20 years, ArtWorks, a program of Partners, has been connecting the public school community with Santa Fe’s world-class art museums and musical and dance performances, pairing professional teaching artists with local arts institutions and public school classrooms in a series of inquiry-driven workshops that build lasting community connections, nurture creative potential and provide the opportunity for continued arts integration and engagement in the classroom. Funding for this program will go directly to the facilitation of ArtWorks workshops to continue this vital work in our community.
- Communities in Schools: Funding will assist the Site Coordinator Program in Santa Fe Public Schools. The school-based, integrated support program is designed to keep students in school, on a path to graduation, and helps ensure they are college/career ready. CIS site coordinators work full-time in schools to provide resources to students based on academic or attendance needs; social/emotional learning needs; and basic needs, such as food, shelter, clothing, and access to medical care.
- Free Bikes 4 Kidz: FB4K believes every child should have access to a bike growing up. By helping kids be more active, more often, FB4K can improve physical and psychological well-being while fostering a sense of independence and self-confidence that will last a lifetime. An additional part of their mission is sustainability, keeping bikes out of landfills through repairs and responsible reuse of component parts.
- Rio Arriba Imagination Library: RAIL works to foster a love of reading among children and their families by encouraging parents and caregivers to read aloud at home for a minimum of 15 minutes per day; thus inciting the excitement of reading for pleasure, while creating a special bonding moment for all involved. Each month, RAIL mails a high-quality, age-appropriate book to all registered children, addressed to them, at no cost to the child’s family.
- New Mexico Ballet Company: Funds will be used to help NMBC cover the cost of refurbishing its Nutcracker costumes. This show is the NM Ballet Company’s tentpole: it bolsters the costs of NMBC’s less-popular programs and inspires children in the audience to try dance. The production has run annually (with the exception of 2020) since the company’s founding in 1972; some of its costumes have been in use for over a decade.
- Gerard’s House: The “You Are Not Alone” program is a weekly, ongoing peer grief support group for youth ages 12-18 temporarily staying in emergency housing in safe, creative, and welcoming environments that encourage dialogue for teens experiencing homelessness.
- The Sky Center/NMSIP: The grant will help fund Project AWARE (Accessible Wellness & Resilience Enhancement). This continuing initiative, piloted in 2019, combines a 2 school-wide approach with promising methods for addressing depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts among school-age children and adolescents.
- St. Elizabeth’s Shelter/Casa Familia: Funding will support Casa Familia services for some of our community’s most desperate children, those whose low-income families have become homeless and require immediate emergency shelter, and who are at serious risk for developmental, physical, and behavioral health problems.
When 2021 rolled around, even after battling through daunting pandemic challenges, Zozobra and the keepers of his flame never quit on kids! Kiwanis was as determined as ever to host a great burn, even though the 2020 pandemic burn with no audience and ticket revenues had left event finances in dire straits. As the second long year of the pandemic wore on, event costs continued to rise and supply chain issues added new headaches, but there was never any doubt that Zozobra would burn.
While prospects for the return of a live audience in 2021 improved, a new pandemic variant began to affect our community, and it became imperative to severely limit in-person attendance at the 2021 Burning of Zozobra. As a result of this conscientious but critical decision to limit the audience to a mere 1/5 of normal attendance to allow social distancing, net proceeds of ticket revenues that are the annual mainstay of Zozobra’s fundraising were dramatically reduced even while expenses for an in-person event increased.
Despite these formidable 2021 challenges, Kiwanis was able to burn the gloom but that was only part of our purpose. Even though the limited audience affected ticket revenues, the net proceeds of Zozobra 2021 allowed Kiwanis to donate $25,000 to non-profits that aid Santa Fe’s underserved youth.
Grants were made to the following area nonprofit organizations that help make a better life for children.
- $4,000 to Cooking with Kids
- $3,500 to CASA First Judicial District
- $3,500 to Esperanza Shelter, Inc.
- $3,500 to Youth Works
- $3,000 to St. Elizabeth Shelter
- $2,500 to Solace Crisis Treatment Center
- $2,500 to Gerard’s House
- $2,500 to Girls Inc.
In 2020, Zozobra was the only event in the State of New Mexico that took place in live time as planned, albeit without a live audience and was instead televised and streamed live on the web for free, making the event equally accessible to grandparents who watched on TV with loved ones and millennials who tuned in on their phones as they texted each other.
With no ticket sales, the Santa Fe Kiwanis created a new way to raise funds and continue to help our community’s kids –– the Burn My Gloom campaign, a program that continues to produce additional revenue to this day!
For a nominal fee, thousands of people rid themselves of 2020’s sorrows by submitting their gloomy thoughts online, which Kiwanis printed on paper and stuffed inside Zozobra to burn. Many shared the moment by making a gift of gloom release to others –– family members who needed to let go of anxieties, friends who lost a job, or first responders who deserved a break.
And even without the ticket revenues that a typical live audience of 65,000 would normally have generated, combined funds raised from the 2020 Burning of Zozobra, the Burn My Gloom campaign, merchandise sales, and substantial savings from reduced logistics and equipment for a no-crowd event resulted in net proceeds of $44,000, donated in grants of $4,000 each to eleven Santa Fe area nonprofits that made life better for kids.
Everyone who participates in our Zozobra fundraising event in Santa Fe makes a difference for children and you can continue that good work by joining your local Kiwanis Club or making a deeply appreciated donation to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe.
Despite the 2020 challenges of the pandemic, Kiwanis was able to transfer $44,000 in hard-won net proceeds from the 96th Burning of Zozobra to the Santa Fe Downtown Kiwanis Foundation to help make a difference in the lives of local youth. In March 2021, the Foundation made grants of $4,000 each to the following area nonprofits that mirror the Kiwanis mission of helping children learn, experience, dream, grow, succeed and thrive.
- Esperanza Shelter: Funding was used to create welcome backpacks and purchase pack-and-play cribs and combo car seat/strollers for children who enter the emergency shelter.
- Cooking with Kids: This award-winning program helped students explore, prepare and taste fresh, affordable foods from diverse cultural traditions in a fun, supportive setting to positively change eating behaviors, increase home cooking practices, and help engage students in creative and cross-disciplinary ways.
- The Sky Center/Suicide Intervention Project: Funds were used to support an 8-month training program for Natural Helpers at local Santa Fe schools, creating a diversified group of students trained as catalysts of change in their school communities by working in a resiliency enhancement and suicide prevention program for middle school youth.
- St. Elizabeth’s Shelter/Casa Familia: Funds supported Casa Familia services for children whose low-income families have become homeless and require immediate emergency shelter, and who are at serious risk for developmental, physical and behavioral health problems.
- Girls, Inc. of Santa Fe: Funding allowed Girls, Inc. to continue to respond to requests for services by maintaining their staff and adapt programming to an online format, create new curricula to address the girls’ changing needs, deliver programs to a diverse population, and find additional resources for girls and their families.
- El Rancho de Las Golondrinas: Funds were used to support the ongoing Spanish Colonial Days and other Education and Outreach opportunities for New Mexico children and teens.
- Gerard’s House: Funding assisted the “You Are Not Alone” program, a weekly, ongoing peer grief support group for youth ages 12-18 temporarily staying in emergency housing in safe, creative and welcoming environments that encourage dialogue for teens experiencing homelessness.
- Solace Crisis Treatment Center: Funds were used to help make advocates available to locate and facilitate support services for families in dangerous circumstances
- YouthWorks: Funds assisted the Culinary Training program with additional expenses due to COVID-19 and addressed safety measures, food requirements and additional staffing for an invaluable program serving thousands of children, youth and families.
- Reading Quest: Funds supported a two-week “Reading is Magic” summer camp to be held in July 2021, celebrating the 10th year of this successful camp program, which will be offered in person or online as during last summer.
- Youth Shelters and Family Services: Funds supported the purchase of cell phones and Chromebooks for young clients to further their case management, education, and employment opportunities.