The contributions were made at council's meeting on September 27, and go towards prizes for the Business Chamber's 'Buy Local' campaign and Tourism's Christmas lights competition.

The Buy Local campaign will see two $1000, eight $500 and five $250 Cowra Cash Card prizes delivered each week from December 3 to December 17.

While the Christmas lights competition would see four Cash Card prizes awarded, $2000 for the best house, $1000 for the runner up, $1500 for best village rural property and $500 for the people's choice.

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Speaking in open forum, Chamber Vice-President Sylvia White said the 2020 promotion had been an amazing success.

"During the 2020 Christmas period, which was November and December last year, the total load up on Cowra Cash Cards was $102,000 and the total number of cards that were loaded up was 922," she said,

"Spent in local stores during that Christmas giveaway period was $284,000, there's quite a few other regions that run a similar sort of program, and last year Cowra actually came number one across those 55 communities.

"We recorded the highest total of cards loaded, cards redeemed, the dollar figure loaded and redemption of cards."

She said, in addition to the $284,000, an additional $38,000 was spent using Cowra Cash Cards themselves, bringing the total to $322,000.

"It's certainly worth a promotion," Ms White said.

"Particularly in these sorts of times to help our our local businesses recover from what we have been going through."

Councilor Judi Smith said the programs were a great way to support the community.

"I think it's a really worthy thing to do, to help out businesses that have been doing it tough really over the past couple of years because of COVID closures and before that because of the drought," she said.

"I think it's a lot of fun for the community, particularly the Christmas lights competition, which was really well supported last year and I'm sure will be even more so this year."

Cr Bruce Miller said the contributions were a small price to pay to provide a lift to local businesses, while Cr Bill West said it was an ideal campaign for council to support.

"It is certainly difficult times and to be able to do this, is something that I think we ought to be doing and need to be doing," he said.

"When we come through this, and we will come through it, we're going to need to give as much support to each other as we possibly can to get this community back on track as quickly as we can.

"It's going to be council leading in some areas but council also encouraging the community to lead as well and we know the Business Chamber and Cowra Tourism do just that."

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