Hope you all had a nice, relaxing Thanksgiving!
Part of my job is to advise the Freshmen and Sophomore Student Government Boards. This year, the Sophomore board decided that they wanted to set a goal of raising enough money to purchase and donate 500 turkeys to families in need in our neighboring Bridgeport community. In the middle of October, their Community Service Chair, Alexa Wrinn started to frequent my office. She had the awesome idea of working with our IT department to set up a secure online donation site on our website. IT was very helpful and worked with us to set up the site. They decided that they would set a minimum donation online at $15 (which they estimated as the price of a small turkey). The board emailed out the website to their families and friends as well as the university community and all university parents. Donations started coming in left and right!
This event was spear-headed by the Sophomore class but they had a Student Government wide effort. All boards did everything they could to help. Such as, at SHU Hoops Madness they asked for a "recommended" dollar donation at the door to go to the Turkey Drive and that event raised then $448. Also, at Senior Pub Night, they $2 cover charge went to the Turkey Drive which raised about $92. The board had tables outside of Chartwells for 6 different days where they asked students, faculty and staff for donations. As an incentive for donating, they advertised "get your name on a feather!" The larger the donation, the larger the feather they recieved to be displayed on "Tommy the Turkey."
Above is a picture of "Tommy" all decorated with the donation feathers. The board encouraged teams to pool together and combine their efforts to put their team name on large feather. Next to "Tommy the Turkey" was a giant thermometer to track the donations and see how close they were to their goal of 500 turkeys. In another effort to raise funds, two Student Government members dressed up as a Turkey and Pilgrim and went around to all the offices on campus asking for donations. The faculty, staff and students donated $360 to Tommy and the Pilgrim!
After all of the efforts, on the last day of our drive, around 4pm they reached their goal of 502 turkeys! They had raised over $7,100. Alexa Wrinn, who is the Community Service Chair for the board was so estatic that she started to cry in excitement! All of their time, effort and hard work was rewarded! Shop Rite of Stratford worked with us to place an order of 500 turkeys that we picked up on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Right after that, members of Student Government delivered the Turkeys to St. Charles Food Pantry in Bridgeport. So many families had a meal on Thanksgiving thanks to thing university wide effort. I am so very proud of the board and all that they have done! 502 turkeys! Congrats again to the Class board of 2013!
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Posted by: Kieera | August 30, 2011 at 07:20 AM