Up 'til Dawn celebrates top school


Chico State students receive the school's Up 'til Dawn prorgam of the year award

Chico State students John R. McCoy, Lindsay Twilegar (co-executive director),
Elizabeth Rodriguez (PR director), Rebecca Bonner (co-executive director) and
Carl Zinn (executive director) acccept the school's award as the Up 'til Dawn
program of the year.

As students at California State University, Chico (Chico State) return to campus this fall, they will not only be prepared for a new year of learning, but also to defend their 2006-2007 National Championship.

You may not have heard about this national title because this one has nothing to do with basketball, football, baseball or any other sport. Instead it was Chico State's commitment to help the patients and families at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that made it the top fundraising school within the St. Jude Up ‘til Dawn fundraising program.

During the 2006-2007 school year, students at Chico State raised more than $187,000 for St. Jude. The total was enough to defeat the reigning champion, the University of Memphis, and bring Chico State’s cumulative giving to nearly $500,000 since the school joined the program in 2001.

Larry Bassow, Chico State’s program coordinator for Greek Life and Up ‘til Dawn adviser, feels the school’s accomplishment is similar to a national championship. And he is treating it as such.

“We’re going to have a banner hanging in our student union that says we are the 2006-2007 National Champions,” Bassow says. “But the only thing harder than being No. 1 is staying No. 1,” Bassow adds. So Chico State is challenging itself for the new school year, setting a goal of $200,000. “I have no idea if we are going to reach it, but we will give it our best shot,” Bassow says.


In the Beginning

Begun in 1998, Up ‘til Dawn seeks to provide students the opportunity to help the children and families of St. Jude while also having fun. More than 250 colleges and universities now participate in the program, including schools such as the College of William and Mary, Kansas State University, Truman State University, Colorado State University and Pepperdine University. To date, the program has raised more than $16.5 million for St. Jude.

Taking place during the school year, students begin events almost as soon as they return to campus, which can include letter-writing campaigns, softball tournaments, hot wing eating contests, karaoke contests and AutoTrader.com car washes (AutoTrader.com is the national sponsor of Up ‘til Dawn), just to name a few.

The campaign culminates with an end of year party where the students celebrate their accomplishments and stay … well, up ‘til dawn.

Bassow has been involved with Chico State’s program in some capacity since the school joined the program in 2001. “For the first three years I helped peripherally. I got prizes for their events,” Bassow says. During those first three years, Chico State raised an average of $37,000.

Then in the program’s fourth year, Bassow took over as adviser. “I saw it as a program that had a lot of potential,” he says. “I thought it was something we could really turn into something big.”

And it has. The first year under Bassow, the school raised $81,000, then topped $100,000 and $180,000 during the next two years for an average of more than $125,000. “We’ve had some great support and some great students, and it has worked out for us these past few years,” Bassow says.


Learning Leadership

One aspect of the Up ‘til Dawn program is the St. Jude Collegiate Leadership seminar that takes place each summer on the St. Jude campus. This year, more than 650 students from the various colleges came to Memphis where they walked the halls of St. Jude, met the children and families they are helping, and learned fundraising initiatives to take back to their schools in order to lead a successful program.

“I learned a lot about motivation,” says Lindsay Twilegar, incoming co-executive director of the Chico State Up ‘til Dawn program. For Twilegar, who is a junior, the trip to Memphis was her first trip to St. Jude. She says it was exciting to finally see the hospital that she has spent the last two years raising funds for and to see the impact it is having on the lives of children. “What I had been told about the hospital didn’t compare to what it is actually like there,” she says.

While the seminar sessions educated Twilegar in motivation and marketing, she found the most beneficial aspect to be the networking that takes place with the students from other schools. “Talking with students from other colleges and hearing about the programs that work for them was very educational,” Twilegar says. “It gives us new ideas on what we can do at our campus.”


Expanding the Future

Bassow stresses that the “national championship” that Chico State is celebrating this year is not being done to create a competition among schools. “If we start making it a competition, we lose sight of what St. Jude is about,” he says.

Instead, Bassow hopes the title will help generate more support for the hospital among the student body at Chico State.

“I don’t believe we have even scratched the surface,” he says. “We have 16,000 people on our campus, and 10 percent of them participate in the event. I’d like to believe we can get more than that. If we do our job right in promoting the hospital, the money will come.”

Interested in having your school join Up ‘til Dawn? Visit www.stjude.org/utd.

 

August 2007

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