QTHON and The Big Event are two of the biggest events — focused on giving back to the community — of the year for Quinnipiac students. When the pandemic hit, the university felt the impact as the events were forced to go virtual. This year, both of the events were able to rework their typical format, to provide in-person experiences similar to those in the past.
QTHON
QTHON is the largest philanthropy event at Quinnipiac that raises funds and awareness through the university’s Dance Marathon. It is completely student run and 100% of the proceeds go to Connecticut Children’s in Hartford, Conn. Throughout the year, students and organizations register and create fundraising pages, participate in events and ask for donations from friends and family.
Connecticut Childrens, a nonprofit organization, depends on donations to run its programs. For example, with the help of QTHON’s donations a few years ago, the organization was able to jumpstart a new dialysis center. With 39 satellite locations throughout the state, QTHON’s impact is widespread according to Caitlyn Napierkowski, the director of operations for QTHON 2021.
Napierkowski — who is originally from Cheshire, Conn. — has been involved in QTHON since her freshman year, where she started off as a dancer. However, she said she knew she was interested in it since she was 5 years old. Napierkowski, 21, was a day patient at Connecticut Children’s herself, so she sees her participation in QTHON as her coming full-circle. Now, she is focused on helping other kids in need.
“These kids are so little, they’re so young and all they want to do is go to school and hang out with their friends or go to the playground or be home and they just can’t,” Napierkowski, senior nursing major said. “It allows you to be a part of something bigger than yourself and you’re creating an impact in somebody’s life that you’ll probably never meet.”
In the past, QTHON would take place in Burt Kahn, kicking off with an opening ceremony where families got to introduce their miracle child. The Dance Marathon would then continue for 10 hours straight, encouraging participants to not sit for the duration of the event.
Every hour on the hour, the management team and morale committee would perform their 10 minute long morale dance. Then, following the morale dance, a family would get up and share their kids story, or some of the older miracle children would tell their own story.
“It’s a really eye opening experience,” Napierkowski said. “You hear you’re making a difference, but to hear it from somebody who’s experienced that. It brings tears to my eyes every hour.”
QTHON was scheduled for March 21 last year and had 1,200 participants signed up. When COVID-19 hit, the organizers switched gears quickly to hold an entirely remote event.
According to QTHON’s website, this year has 1,062 participants on the docket and 49 teams signed up for the in-person Dance Marathon. It will be held on April 17 and will be moved outdoors to Quinnipiac’s quad area.
The 10-hour dance marathon will still take place, but to follow university guidelines, there can only be 100 people at a time with masks and social distancing. To accompany this requirement, dancers this year will be scheduled for an hour-long time slot, and can follow the rest of the day virtually.
“This year every hour will be a theme hour. Our main goal is to ensure that everybody gets the whole QTHON experience, or as much of the whole QTHON experiences as they can in their timeframe,” Napierkowski said. “So, there will be miracle stories, there will be theme hours, there will be competitions, games and different things.”
While a lot of planning has gone into the day so far, Napierkowski said her biggest concern is making the experience as unique and special as it has always been.
“I just hope everybody has that same feeling, that same magical feeling that I felt the last two years that I was able to walk through the doors of QTHON and see everyone who’s there that all shares in the same mission.” Napierkowski said.
This year is the 10th anniversary of QTHON at Quinnipiac, and in the 9 years prior to this year, QU’s QTHON program has donated a total of around $1.2 million to Connecticut Childrens. Napierkowski said that while the impact of COVID has taken a toll on everyone financially, their goal for this year remains the same.
“Even though COVID has impacted this whole world, a lot, our goal is still to raise as much as we possibly can for these kids and their families at Connecticut Childrens and make sure that they’re getting 110% from us, no matter what,” Napierkowski said.
The Big Event
The Big Event is the largest community service project on campus. In the past, around 1,600 to 1,800 students, faculty and alumni would come together to participate in one day of service, traveling to upwards of 100 different sites in the Hamden and Greater New Haven area. This year, the Big Event is taking place in-person on April 10.
“The community around us is constantly supporting Quinnipiac, allowing us to infiltrate the area, dealing with the students all the time,” Alyssa Lawson, senior health science studies major said. “So being able to have one day we can give back and say thank you for all of your support is really important to us.”
Lawson, 22, from Byfield, Massachusetts, is a co-director of the Big Event this year, alongside Kara Boninsegna. Both Lawson and Boninsegna have been involved in community service since high school, and have been a part of the Big Event at Quinnipiac since their freshman year.
“We’re all a big family,” Boninsegna, senior in the entry-level MHS physician assistant program said. “We all have a lot of fun so it’s just a great community, and it really was like my first family at QU which is awesome.”
As co-directors, Lawson and Boninsegna work year-round to make the Big Event happen. In a normal year, the Big Event starts with an opening ceremony, then participants pick up tools and are sent off to their sites for their three hours of service. When COVID-19 hit last spring, the Big Event went virtual.
“Last year when we weren’t able to have an in-person event at all, we had a lot of remote options that we put out on our Instagram and just kind of encouraged people to do it every day,” Lawson said. “We kind of made it a week-long thing last year.”
This year, while the in-person event is still scheduled, there are also options for remote students who plan on doing synchronous community service in their home areas on the day of the event. Lawson and Boninsegna worked with the events’ committee to create a COVID-19 plan and got it approved by Quinnipiac’s COVID-19 Task Force.
Along with precautions like masks, sanitizing and social distancing, the event itself has been reformatted to ensure people’s safety. Instead of an in-person opening ceremony, a video is being sent out to participants via email the day before the event. Tool pick-up is going to be a no-contact drive-through in North Lot. The event’s E-board also checked sites to make sure that they were safe places to send the students.
“We did do some COVID checks at new sites or sites that may have modified since we last had been there just to make sure that they did have the space and the capacity to be able to hold however many people they requested, they had PPE and they were wearing their own masks,” Lawson said.
In order to follow guidelines, many of the sites this year have decreased their capacity. For instance, Camp Cedarcrest has notoriously been the Big Event’s biggest volunteer site, recording around 300 Quinnipiac volunteers in a normal year. However, this year, only about 30 participants will volunteer at the camp.
The pandemic has taken a toll on the number of overall event participants, but Boninsegna is still looking at the bright side.
“This year we’ve got almost 700 (participants), in or around 700, which is awesome,” Boninsegna, 21, from Berlin, Conn., said. “We have a really large amount of faculty and alumni participating this year, which we don’t usually get a huge turnout in the past, so that’s awesome.”
While the numbers aren’t as big as in the past, Lawson and Boninsegna still plan on the event having a big impact.
“I think, as long as we can get out there and help our community in any way possible, I think there’s a huge impact,” Boninsegna said “It’s so nice for students to be able to give back to the community.”
