Las Vegas Weekly

January 22, 2009 · 10:36 AM

$5 million gift to Boys & Girls Club of Las Vegas stuns Sin City

By Robin Leach

Mitchel Musso, Oliver from Disney Channel's Hannah Montana, teaches kids about washing their hands.

Photo: Kirvan Doak Communications

It’s a whopper of a check! The size of the gift has stunned Sin City! This afternoon, Kris Engelstad-McGary will present a $5 million check on behalf of her family to the Boys & Girls Club of Las Vegas! The presentation will take place at 4 p.m. at the Al Snyder Boys & Girls Club near Boulevard Mall.

The $5 million breaks down with $2.5 million to be used for reconstruction of the Al Snyder location, plus a $1.5 million gift for college scholarships for the youngsters there and $1 million to start an endowment fund to maintain the new building into the future.

So far, I haven’t been able to find anybody to tell me of a larger one-time gift to the organization in the history of Las Vegas. The mission of the Boys & Girls Club is to enable all young people, especially those most needy, to reach their full potential as productive, caring and responsible citizens. The club serves more than 12,000 youths ages 5 to 8 in eight facilities throughout the valley.

Ralph Engelstad, the patriarch of the family, scraped together a $2,500 loan to start his construction business in the 1950s. In the ’60s, he began housing construction in Las Vegas and went on to become a multimillionaire real estate magnate. In 1979, Ralph opened one of the then largest privately owned casino hotels in the world at center Strip: the Imperial Palace. In December 1998, he donated $100 million to his alma mater the University of North Dakota.

Congratulations to the Engelstad family for their incredible generosity and unselfish act of community spirit and service!

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