NEW ORLEANS — This is a new one!
Thanks to fundraising and creativity from New Orleans' Carnival community, following Louisiana's mask mandate in New Orleans may now lead to more than protecting lives -- it could land you $10,000.
The Krewe of Red Beans has teamed up with other krewes to create the Mask Up Raffle Drawing to help encourage mask wearing in the city to curb the spread of COVID-19.
For two weeks starting Monday, volunteers from the Krewe of Red Beans, Krewe of Mayahuel and Lucha Krewe will go around different neighborhoods and surprise people that are wearing a protective mask with raffle tickets.
2,000 tickets will be handed out as krewe members thank people for wearing a mask, with one lucky winner drawing the big prize at the end of the contest.
"Mask Wearing is overly-political…or people just are not motivated…. Or perhaps they don’t have a mask. Let’s fight all three at once!" organizers said.
Organizers said they will never disclose where they will be handing out tickets, as to not encourage people to go out. They will not go indoors, and will keep the hand-outs a surprise on the streets.
And the krewes are not working alone. They've partnered with the Louisiana Department of Health to strategically include neighborhoods that most need to flatten the growth of the virus in their area. As of Monday, July 20, there were more than 91,000 COVID-19 cases across Louisiana, with more than 3,400 people dying from the disease.
Devin De Wulf, founder of the Krewe of Red Beans, said the idea for the giveaway came to him after his experience as a teacher.
"When you're a school teacher, there's positive reinforcement and there's negative reinforcement," De Wulf said. "Positive reinforcement is a lot more powerful as a motivator, and that's what we're going to do."
De Wulf said he hopes the economic incentive will give people another reason to mask up.
"If we make it fun and we make it like a game show and we give people the positive reinforcement... for those people that refuse to wear a mask, maybe they'll just do it for the money," De Wulf said.
He said the organizations hope to hold these sweepstakes several times, and encouraged people to donate to the fund at the official event website.
De Wulf also said the initiative will be bi-lingual to include New Orleans' Spanish-speaking community.
For more information on the sweepstakes, click here.
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