Running to Raise Money For Malaria

This year, DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., hosted the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference (SCAC) Track and Field Championships.  I am a runner at DePauw and have a passion for advocating for malaria awareness and raising funds for bed nets (I’ve held various events at DePauw and started Knitting for Nets through a Buzzcuts grant).  At first, the fact that World Malaria Day fell on the same day as the Conference meet seemed unfortunate.  How could I host an event when I had to be running?  
 
Then I realized we could combine the two events and maximize the amount of people we could reach.  Instead of just reaching the DePauw and Greencastle community we could reach people from Colorado, Texas, Tennesee, to name a few, all the fans and participants from the teams in our conference.  So the SCAC netraiser championships were born.  We set up camp at the track meet and set out buckets for each team in the conference.  Fans would come by and support their team, and the fight against malaria, by dropping money in their team’s bucket.  By the end of the two-day meet every bucket had some money in it.  We also passed out Nothing But Nets sweatbands and some runners even wore them during their races. 

Overall we raised $335.43 during the two days of the meet.  DePauw raised the most money and was the Netraiser champ!  I think the event was very successful and we were able to get information out to a lot of people through announcements during the meet (even if they didn’t make it over to our table) and raise a lot of money for mosquito nets.  My coach was very excited that we had raised enough money to buy 33 nets.