LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Mike Mulrooney's bright orange blazer is emblazoned with a two-word motto that's now a catchphrase of his organization, Shirley's Way. The same two words are featured on t-shirts in the organization's gift shop and posters on its wall.
Cancer sucks.
"Cancer's turned into a rich person's game," Mulrooney said. "It really has. And it's sad."
He lost his mother, Shirley, to cancer in 2013. Afterward, he pondered one key question: How could he help others diagnosed with cancer pay overwhelming medical bills?
Shirley’s Way was born. The organization donates sums of money to those fighting cancer and fundraises for other causes too.
"When you write a check to help save somebody's home, because they're too sick to work and make their payment, it's just a feeling that you can't describe," he said.
While Shirley's Way depends on regular donations from organizations and private individuals, for years, it's raised much of its funding through gaming. Its facility on Dixie Highway in southwest Louisville boasts dozens of pull-tab machines.
"You know, having bake sales and selling brownies and cookies — you're not going raise the kind of funds that you need to help people in the community," he explained.
Shirley's Way also sells tickets for regular raffles. Mulrooney, though, says a decision the state of Kentucky recently made is impacting the raffles, and it could jeopardize ticket sales and the money raised to help cancer patients.
In May 2020, as COVID-19 spread in Kentucky and the United States, the Kentucky Department of Charitable Gaming filed an emergency resolution that allowed raffles, including those done at Shirley's Way, to use "random number generators" to determine the winners of the raffles.
Mulrooney says, under that system, Shirley’s Way could go online, enter ticket numbers on a site like Calculator.net, and digitally draw a ticket number and determine a winner in just seconds. It was a quick and easy process, he said.
"It's really been a game-changer for what we had in mind with our raffle website," Mulrooney said.
But in February 2021, as COVID-19 cases declined, the emergency provision expired. Mulrooney, who adapted his online operation to correspond with the provision, had to revert to the old way of doing business: printing the thousands of tickets purchased in a raffle, placing them in a cylinder and hand-drawing the winner.
Mike Mulrooney spins the raffle cylinder in Shirley's Way. (WDRB Photo)
Mulrooney says that process is time-consuming, limits the number of tickets Shirley's Way can sell and strains its busy raffle schedule.
"With tickets and printing tickets and doing all that, it takes all day to print these tickets and put them in the cylinder," he said. "If you sell $10,000-$20,000 of tickets, you can't efficiently print those out and get them in the cylinder. It's just not physically possible."
Additionally, Mulrooney says any work-around would require cutting through expensive, if not impossible, government red tape.
"This regulation change was very tough for us," he said.
The raffles at Shirley's Way will continue, but Mulrooney worries the switch will inevitably take a bite out of the organization's bottom line and, as a result, hurt its battle against cancer.
While he isn’t angry at the state or its Department of Charitable Gaming, he hopes a common sense solution will prevail.
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