Aaron Johnson – General Assignment Reporter
The Greek Life of Southern Connecticut State University are hosting the first ever six-hour long dancing marathon to help raise money for the Yale-New Haven Children Hospital. The event – dubbed the Owl-thon – will be held from 6 p.m. on Feb. 21 until midnight on Feb. 22 in the Moore Field House.
“We’re holding the event in Moore Field House on campus and the whole point honestly isn’t to dance for six hours but to stay on your feet for as long as you can,” said Derek Emerick, the President of Greek Life. “Each hour dancing will change from ballroom, hip-hop, etc. Dancing will be taking place on the basketball court with the purpose to be there on your feet for as long as you can. We’re also having a lot of families coming to support..”
According to the official Owl-thon Facebook page, teams will be able to register online on the Owl-Thon website when it becomes available. The website will also act as an easy way to send donations via the internet. Emerick said that each individual fraternity and sorority in Greek Life will be participating including Delta Phi Epsilon and Tau Kappa Epsilon.
“Everyone in Greek Life will be involved in this event. Each fraternity and sorority will have representatives on the committee to help with the planning,” said Emerick.
The event will also include three different categories for the organizations to have a little friendly competition. These categories are: what organization raised the most money, which individual person raised the most money, and which organization has the best outfits. The outfits will be associated from the different themes for every hour of the night. Each team will be assigned a dance theme, and will have the opportunity to dress as that theme to enter into the contest for best-dressed theme.
“I was the one who came up with the dance-a-thon idea. I have a lot of friends in other Greeks at other schools and I was looking for something that Southern doesn’t do,” said Emerick. “I looked at other schools and what they do. I realized we needed to do something that we haven’t done before and it needed to be something new, something big. The main reason, of course, is to raise money to support such a good cause.”
Emerick said that there is a lot of excitement about this event and that they are expecting this to become an annual fundraiser for Greek Life on campus.
“Oh absolutely I do expect us to do this again in the future. The website will be re-used.” said Emerick. “We really want to make this bigger and better in the future. Sad part for this year is I didn’t come up with doing this until about September so there hasn’t been as much time as we may have liked. But we are still expecting that things will work out okay.”
While the preparations for the event are already well underway, Emerick said that the main goal of the Owl-thon is to raise awareness, but the Greek Life committee will try to reach their monetary goal.
“My biggest thing with this event is that we want to raise as much money as possible obviously but
we also want the to raise the awareness,” said Emerick. “I want the goal to be at least $5,000. There will be a $10 registration fee and whoever registers will also get a free t-shirt. The big thing about it is the awareness because Southern needs something big.”
