Many times, students will struggle to get out of bed just to go to class. With social activities happening on weekend nights, getting students to wake up before 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning can be a bit of a struggle.
But, if it’s for a good cause to help the greater good, college students will get up for anything.
University of Hartford students involved in Greek Life organizations participated in the 2015 Walk to End Alzheimer’s this past Sunday morning at Bushnell Park in Hartford.
As the title of event says, it was a walk that helped raise awareness and donations for the Alzheimer’s Association. Sunday’s event in Hartford was one of six walks to take place in Connecticut throughout the month.
Each and every fraternity and sorority was represented at the walk.
Registration began at 8:30 a.m. with the actual walk running from 10 a.m. – noon.
It was a sea of purple at Bushnell since participants were given purple shirts to represent the awareness color for Alzheimer’s disease. They also gave out flowers of varying colors with each color standing for a person’s level of connection to Alzheimer’s.
“It was definitely cool to come together as a community,” Interfraternity Council (IFC) vice president of public relations and communications Jake Greenberg said. “It was still cool to share that bond, that information that ‘this is real, I support this.’ You don’t get that for most events like this so it was cool to have that more tangible component to it.”
Brothers at the Walk to End Alzheimer's in Bushnell Park pic.twitter.com/gS795fwvR3
— AEPi Hartford (@AEPi_Hartford) September 20, 2015
With what seemingly feels like constant negative attention in the media toward college fraternities and sororities — most recently, a hazing death at Baruch College in New York — the University of Hartford’s Greek Life really wanted to make a push to show that that’s not what happens here.
“Yes, we all like to have a good time and we are all college students, but we are the organizations that wake up at eight o’clock in the morning after a night of social activities,” IFC vice president of standards and practices Richard Hoover said. “We are the people that get there and when you look around, you don’t see a lot of college students there. We really wanted to push to the community that we are the ones raising the money, getting up on Saturday and Sunday mornings, making a push for community.”
“Especially at the University of Hartford, we pride ourselves on going on the complete flip side and making it all positive publicity,” Greenberg said. “At the end of the day, it’s all worth it.”
#SigmaNu at the Alzheimer's walk at Bushnell Park, CT. .@SigmaNuHQ .@Hartford_IFC pic.twitter.com/z6VAdbK7oo
— Sigma Nu | Hartford (@SigmaNu_UHart) September 20, 2015
Participating in the event, as well as making donations, were not mandated by the Greek Life organizations. It was up to individual preferences on what they wanted to do or how much they wanted to donate.
“There’s no pushing ‘oh each chapter needs to raise this much money,’ or ‘each chapter needs to have this many people,’ because that numbs the process of this is for the greater good, this is a great cause,” Greenberg said.
Fraternities and sororities are required to have at least 15 philanthropy hours throughout the fall semester.
“That’s one of the things I really love about Greek Life,” Hoover said. “Being an Eagle Scout, I’ve always done a lot of community service and I wanted to stay involved with that. It’s one of the reasons I got involved with Greek Life.”
In addition to philanthropy events that individual Greek Life chapters will do, they’ll also be participating in an AIDS Walk/Run, Light the Night Walk for leukemia, Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk and the Nearly Naked Mile run/walk during Hawktober Week.
