LOAS’s first year expanding to Oxford
By Joseph Goral
Staff Writer
jgoral@mihomepaper.com
Lake Orion’s American Summer (LOAS) donated $1,000 to Oxford and Lake Orion’s trolley program on Aug. 15, in the group’s continued effort to support small businesses.
This year marked the event’s ninth in operation and its first including Oxford in on the festivities, according to LOAS President Brian Birney.
The money donated was LOAS’s proceeds from this year’s mid-American bar crawl with Lake Orion, according to Oxford DDA Executive Director Kelley Westbrook.
Birney said the activity is LOAS’s most popular, and that many of last year’s participants asked about using the trolley to go to Oxford.
“It made perfect sense with the downtown trolley to donate to that this year because that essentially is what that does,” Birney said. “It brings both those communities together so members of each community can enjoy both.”
Birney said that involving Oxford through the pub crawl showed “we have two different names for cities, but we’re really all one big community.”
“The ultimate goal is to benefit both communities as much as we possibly can,” Birney said.
Birney runs LOAS with his daughter Kaitlin, a sophomore at Lake Orion High School, who Birney said works behind the scenes, calls “a lot of the shots and [does] a lot of the dirty work a lot of adults wouldn’t want to do.”
Birney, his daughter and LOAS have raised $6,460 for local nonprofits. The LOAS celebration begins with the Lake Orion Lion’s Club Jubilee and continues July 4.