GAMBIER — A good-sized crowd of Kenyon College students and others from the community showed up for Saturday’s Dance-A-Thon in the Gund Commons Ballroom. The fund-raiser benefited Stewart’s Caring Place in Akron and more than $400 was raised. Several sororities and organizations planned and hosted the event.
The Zeta Alpha Pi Sorority at Kenyon adopted SCP as its project last year and co-organizer Jenna Peskin, a Kenyon sophomore and Akron native, said, “This is the culmination of a year and a half of planning for us. We’ve always wanted to do a huge campuswide fund-raiser for SCP. We’ve done a few things like T-shirt sales and during Rush Week, the Zeta freshman girls baked cookies and we took them up to SCP.”
For the big Dance-A-Thon, six bands signed up. Special T-shirts were sold that listed the names of the sororities and organizations that volunteered their members to help. There was a kids’ hour between 3 and 4 p.m., with kid-oriented music, a piñata, face painting and balloon animals. Dancers were charged a registration fee and donations were also accepted at the door. An iPod Shuffle was raffled off and gift certificates from The Alcove, WG Grinders and Donatos were given away. The Kenyon Ballroom Dancers gave dance lessons and disc jockey Ieisha West gave lessons in line dances.
Co-organizer Paige Roberts, a Kenyon sophomore from Louisville, Ky., said, “SCP is great. We went there with my pledge class last year. It’s a great service for people who are having a hard time and don’t know where to turn. It’s become very personal for a lot of us in the sorority.”
Stewart’s Caring Place is a non-profit cancer wellness and resource center for individuals and families touched by cancer; it is accessible to anyone. It offers services free of charge, including one-on-one counseling, support groups, programs for children, healing arts, a resource library, seminars and workshops. It provides emotional, social, physical and spiritual support to people with cancer in a setting that is inclusive, non-judgmental and confidential, and helps connect cancer patients with others who understand. The center was named for Dr. Stewart Surloff, whose own cancer journey ended in 2001.
Executive Director Don Luscher, who traveled to Gambier for the event, said of the students, “They are great. They are a real inspiration. Our board of directors is so excited to have young women doing this for us. We’re just so proud of them.”
He added, “This age group, for us it seems like their lives are so in flux, from college and onto adulthood, so we’re not getting a lot of people that age doing things for us. It says a lot for this college that these students want to help us.”