On Sunday, April 21, Lake Zurich High School will host ‘Cars for Cause,’ a charity car show that will raise money for Lurie Children’s Hospital.
The car show, which was founded by LZHS students Kyle Sopkin and Mahilan Chandrakumar, juniors, will feature over 60 luxury cars as well as car enthusiast clubs, organizations, and dealerships such as the Ferrari Club of America, Lowend Garage Chicago, Euro Charge Chicago and IND-Distribution. All proceeds will go to Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, a pediatric care facility based in Chicago.
“[Donations to Lurie] usually go to [hospitalized] children [who] don’t have access to sterile toys,” Chandrakumar said.
In addition to funding for toys, the students hope to support cancer research at Lurie.
“Child cancer has been a huge undertaking for oncologists, and research has been extremely expensive,” Chandrakumar said. “[Researchers] cannot solely rely on government funding, so it takes events like these to help boost that research; every dollar raised could be one step closer to curing cancer for all.”
For ten dollars, luxury car owners and dealerships can register to have their vehicles featured at Cars for Cause, while visitors can attend the car show for free. Both parties have the option to donate, which is how the students expect to make the bulk of their proceeds.
“[Luxury] car owners are very wealthy and very generous,” Sopkin said. “Some of the clubs we have coming are very community based and always pledge a certain amount of money to the events that they go to. We anticipate that we will have donations from not only the car owners, but the clubs that are coming.”
The idea for the event came from the growing number of luxury car owners visiting Lake Zurich, due to places such as Lago, a high-end restaurant, and Life Time, a luxury gym, opening up.
“We realized that the car scene in the area is really, really on the increase,” Sopkin said. “You drive on the streets, [and] there’s just a lot of really nice cars […] and we wanted to turn that into something that had a more [philanthropic] aspect [to] it.”
Cars for Cause initially began as a National Honor Society ‘create a service’ project, where NHS students hold their own community service event. However, Sopkin and Chandrakumar saw the opportunity to turn it into something greater.
“Originally, we were going to keep it one isolated event,” Sopkin said. “Then we realized that, with the amount of interest we gained [and] the amount of cars coming, we would be able to turn [Cars for Cause] into an annual or semiannual thing where we would choose a different charity every event.”
In the future, the students plan on raising money for humanitarian aid to Africa and the Middle East, as well as impoverished areas and communities in America.
“The thing with Lake Zurich is that we don’t have many events where whole communities come together. The nice thing about cars is that you have to have at least one person in your family that enjoys cars,” Sopkin said. “Being able to bring this diverse range of people from the community into this event, as well as them coming and seeing the cars is not only supporting our cause, but also bringing the community together.”
Cars for Cause will be held at LZHS, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.. Luxury car owners can register their vehicles to appear at the show on Sunday.
