Put People in the Poky for Make-a-Wish

SUZANNE RAMSEY
College relations staff writer

If you see a member of the Sweet Briar community being carted off to the poky later this month, there’s no need to worry. It’s just for fun and to benefit the Make-A-Wish Foundation .

From 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 31 and Thursday, Nov. 1, Sweet Briar’s business management lab will hold a Jail-A-Thon to raise money and awareness for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, an organization that grants wishes to seriously ill children.

The event will be held on the Lower Quad near Prothro, or the EB Room in case of rain. Throughout the day, students, faculty and staff can pay to put people in jail. Once in lock-up, each inmate has to rustle up some Washingtons to be released.

The cost is $1 for five minutes, $2 for 10 minutes and $3 for 15 minutes. To make bail, the detainee must cough up an equal amount of cash. The class hopes to raise about $100.

“If you get jailed, it’s supposed to be out of fun,” Ashleigh Caisse ’10, one of the event organizers, said. “We are not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings. The money we raise will go to help sponsor a child’s wish.”

The Jail-A-Thon is the first of several events the business management lab has planned for this fall in support of Make-A-Wish. A concert, fashion show and dining hall fast also are in the works.

“We’ve never done a Jail-A-Thon at SBC, so this will be new for us,” assistant professor of business Tom Loftus wrote in an e-mail. “It will be our kickoff event for our Make-A-Wish campaign and we’re certainly hoping for a lot of support from the entire SBC community to make it a great success.

“If you have a friend or enemy you’d like to see behind bars, this will be your chance, and you’ll be helping a great cause and having a lot of fun at the same time.”

In addition to providing entertainment for the College community and money for Make-A-Wish, organizing the fall events will serve as real-world experience for lab students. “Each of these projects involves the students on the event team adopting a mission statement and goals for their event and a set of measurable objects,” Loftus said.

“They need to find a date, come up with a budget, secure the necessary donations and permissions, design and implement a marketing plan and final assessment, as well as a detailed accounting of funds received and expended.

“They also complete a final handbook and report on their event, which serves as a resource for future management labs. It can seem pretty overwhelming at times.”

In the past, the fall lab focused its efforts on Oxfam, a group with a mission to end global poverty, but this year the students decided to do something different and more close to home. After looking at several options, they settled on Make-A-Wish.

“We chose Make-A-Wish because we wanted to work with an organization that was more localized and more personal,” lab CEO Micaela Weiss ’09 said. “None of us had an immediate connection to the organization but all of us had heard the amazing stories about granting a child’s wish.

“Ashleigh Caisse brought the idea and we all agreed that if we worked with a child from around this area we would feel a greater connection to the organization.”

Loftus suspects their decision also grew out of the spring lab’s successful campaign for Amherst County Habitat for Humanity. Their efforts raised $1,500 — more than twice what the lab collected the previous year — and garnered attention from Habitat headquarters in Georgia.

“Each semester, the students seemed determined to do more and better events than the labs that have gone before them, but we’ve had great support from the staff and faculty [at Sweet Briar] and we’re looking forward to a very challenging and successful semester,” Loftus said.

For more information, e-mail Dori Rucker ’09 at rucker09@sbc.edu .