Haddon Heights already had a World Cup watch party planned.
The event called Saturday Heights Live, was set to run on a shoestring. Joe Gentile, co-founder of the nonprofit HIP Inc., which organizes the town’s recurring street events, said the original budget was around $15,000 to $20,000.
A $50,000 state grant is what turned it into something else.
Once the town landed a grant through the state’s World Cup Community Initiative — a N.J. Economic Development Authority program run through Choose New Jersey — the plans grew fast:
- a professional stage and cultural musicians instead of none at all;
- a 70-foot screen instead of a small inflatable one;
- three dedicated soccer activation zones staffed by Rutgers and New Jersey youth soccer coaches instead of a bounce house;
- a drone photographer; extra tents, tables and colored linens;
- and enough additional portable toilets and public safety coverage to satisfy state police requirements for a FIFA-sanctioned event.
All told, more than 50 businesses were involved, Gentile said.
But the bigger story wasn’t the upgrades. It’s where some of the proceeds are going.
Every Saturday Heights Live event donates a dollar from every souvenir cup sold to a partner cause. For this one, Gentile said HIP doubled that to $2 a cup and picked two organizations tied to New Jersey’s agricultural community — the Vegetable Growers Association of New Jersey and the New Jersey Agricultural Society — after a spring freeze wiped out the region’s peach crop.
“It was pretty clear when [area farmers] lost their full peach crop,” he said. “We were like, okay, well, we do a donation for cup sales of every one of our events… let’s do $2, and let’s pick two organizations that are going to benefit farmers.”
HIP bought 3,000 aluminum souvenir cups for the event — deliberately skipping disposable plastic, Gentile said, in a nod to Ball’s own history packaging fruit preserves. If all 3,000 sell, each organization will receive a $3,000 check once the accounting is finalized.
“I guarantee you, there’s probably some people out there that if they didn’t have that mindset, they would have looked at it as like, oh my God, they’re giving us this money,” he said. “Everything that you spend, everything that you do has got to go in a hopper, and that’s going to get given back, because they want to know that their money was well spent.”
The event drew roughly 1,400 people over the course of the day — 768 adults scanned in through a check-in app, plus another 350 children who received wristbands — with about 28% of attendees coming from Haddon Heights itself and the rest from towns across South Jersey, along with visitors from as far as Pennsylvania, Virginia and Florida.
Choose New Jersey CEO Amy Herbold said Haddon Heights was exactly the kind of impact the initiative was designed to produce.
“Choose New Jersey is proud to have helped bring local fan events to communities across the state throughout the World Cup, creating opportunities for New Jersey businesses to benefit from this once-in-a-generation event,” she said. “From celebrations in Haddon Heights to Hoboken, these events were inclusive of the entire state and reflective of New Jersey’s diverse communities, while driving support for the small businesses that are the backbone of our state economy.”
Local businesses along Station Avenue’s roughly 30-business downtown corridor — everything from a Filipino barbecue to Jamaican jerk chicken to a local brewery — benefited.
For Gentile, the payoff wasn’t just economic.
“[There were] kids that never would have met each other, wearing different shirts, speaking different languages,” he said. “Kids hugging at the end of the night, making friends.”
