Dance Marathon raises money for Children's Miracle Network

Kristin Bey, a senior special education major at Southeast Missouri State University, is the chair of the executive board for Southeast's Dance Marathon. On March 2 the Dance Marathon event lasted 12 hours and featured speakers, dancing and inflatables, with a dance at the end that participants learned the moves to over the course of the day. Dance Marathon is a national organization that raises money for Children's Miracle Network, and money raised at Southeast goes to St. Louis Children's Hospital and Cardinal Glennon Hospital.

Q: What is Dance Marathon?

A: Dance Marathon is a student-run organization on campus, and all the money we raise throughout the year is donated directly to Children's Miracle Network, so that benefits St. Louis Children's Hospital and SSM Cardinal Glennon Children's Medical Center. On this year on March 2 we had an event where families from the hospital came, and we had a big celebration for them. There were inflatables, and we basically stayed on our feet for 12 hours to show our support for them and our motto is like, "We stand for those who can't because a lot of kids lying in a hospital bed would do anything to just be kids, to run around," so we're showing our support for them.

On March 2 more than 80 people attended Dance Marathon at Southeast. Participants learned the moves to different dances throughout the 12-hour day. Photo by Alyssa Brewer

Q: What do you do as the chair of the executive board?

A: Personally what I worked on was I led each of the meetings we had on Monday nights, and I worked on getting sponsorship, which paid for our T-shirts and other things that Student Government couldn't fund. And I made reservations for the rec center and just made sure that we had enough food and prizes for all the participants.

Q: What does the executive board do?

A: The exec board throughout the year does fundraisers and other events to raise money for the Children's Miracle Network Hospital and all throughout the year we're planning this event that happens in March. So like a week from now, so actually probably Monday, we'll start planning next year's event already. So it's a year-long process.

Q: What was your fundraising goal?

A: We wanted to get $10,000, so we're still missing quite a bit. Our goal was $10,000 and actually people can still donate through the end of April.

Q: How much has Dance Marathon raised so far?

A: We've raised so far $8,575.

Q: How can people donate?

A: They can visit our website, and there's a link. It's dmatse.weebly.com. There's a "donate now" tab where they can click and donate. We're not asking for registration obviously because our event happened last week. But they can register for next year that way, too, and we're still taking donations through April.

Q: How did Dance Marathon go this year?

A: It went well in comparison to the other years. It kind of all came together, but we didn't have as many participants as we've had in the past and I don't know if it was the snow or the cold that kept some people away. Overall it was really nice, and we had a lot of people that were really energetic and willing to participate for the kids, so I thought it went very well compared to the other years.

Q: How many people attended Dance Marathon?

A: We had about, it's hard to kind of gauge exactly because so many people come in the building, but at one point we had a head count of about 80 to 90, but not everyone stayed the full 12 hours, so we might have had more.

Q: What happened at the actual Dance Marathon event?

A: There's 12 hours of different themes. Like, this year we had celebrity hour, we had neon hour. We just had a whole bunch of different ones. Like, we had Disney soundtrack hour. Each hour had a different theme. Throughout the day the families from the hospital will speak. They're called "miracle families" because they're miracle children, and they were treated at the hospital. And they shared their stories with us and each hour there are prizes given out, and we learned part of the huge dance at the end that lasts probably about 10 minutes. So each hour they're taught a certain part of the dance, so at the end we perform it and record it, and we reveal how much we've raised at the very end.

Q: What other fundraising events do you have planned?

A: We are going to try to do a couple more fundraisers, but we haven't set them up yet because we took a break off from meetings last week since Dance Marathon just happened, so we haven't planned any fundraisers yet. But we're just hoping to get on Facebook and post statuses about fundraising to see if we can generate the rest of that money.

Q: How many students are involved in Dance Marathon?

A: We have about 18.

Q: How do students get involved with Dance Marathon?

A: We're actually going to be taking applications pretty soon. They can email dmsoutheast@gmail.com. They can just send an email saying they want to get involved with Dance Marathon, "Could you give me more information?" and then we'll email them back. And then we're going to be at our common hour table, and we're going to be handing out applications. And sororities and fraternities and things like that, they can get service hours for coming to Dance Marathon.

Q: Why did you pick Children's Miracle Network to support?

A: There are actually a lot of Dance Marathons across the United States, and they all work through Children's Miracle Network, so Children' Miracle Network has multiple hospitals across the United States, so ours benefits St. Louis Children's and Cardinal Glennon, so like other Dance Marathons benefit their local hospitals. So it's just an organization that is straight through Children's Miracle Network, so we don't really get to pick, if that makes sense. If you want more information about Dance Marathon you can look on Children's Miracle Network's website. On that website it actually talks about Dance Marathon and how it got started and things like that. This was our seventh year doing this so it's been around for awhile. Not a lot of people know about us, but it's been here.