Make-A-Wish held its first ever Wish Week last week, starting Monday, Feb. 1 and ending Friday, Feb. 5. The club raised over $2,100 for the Make-A-Wish foundation, surpassing their goal of $2,000 for the week.

Wish Week is an event that the Make-A-Wish foundation puts on at schools across the country every year. Club officers initially heard about the fundraiser idea from Angela Brewer, their Make-A-Wish foundation representative. From there, the club came up with themes for spirit days and ideas to raise money. StuCo and Make-A-Wish eventually decided to put Wish Week in place of what would usually be a spirit week for Winter Homecoming for convenience on both ends.

Senior Audrey Linsey enjoyed the fresh ideas planned throughout Wish Week, especially in what she found to be unique spirit days.  

“The themes were really creative,” Linsey said. “Usually it’s kind of the same with class colors day and all that stuff, but I really liked how they did tourist day and Disney day and all the different themes.”

Several fundraising opportunities were available throughout the week, including a silent auction at a Make-A-Wish-sponsored open mic night at Country Club Cafe on Monday, Feb. 1, and a “Miracle Minute” on Friday, Feb. 5, where club members collected donations from students and community members at the boys basketball game.

Senior public relations officer Camille Gatapia was in charge of the silent auction at the Country Club Cafe open mic night. Although she said the actual auction was not as successful as she had hoped, general donations from students and community that night raised about $360. Gatapia, who also performed at the event with senior Gabby Saunders, said the turnout was unbelievable.

“It was crazy to see that much obvious support for something,” Gatapia said. “We were concerned about how many people were going to be there, and we even debated bringing fliers and putting them in neighborhoods, but, seeing how many people were there, it was clear we didn’t even need to do that because there was just so much support from the students alone.”

Linsey performed several of her own original songs at the event and said she enjoyed the experience.

“My favorite part of Wish Week was open mic night,” Linsey said. “It was a good way to showcase all the talent [we have] at the school, and it’s a good way to hear people sing that you wouldn’t regularly, so that was really awesome.”

Although the Open Mic Night was successful, the club ran into several problems throughout the week with other events. Due to the school’s busy schedule filled with seminar meetings for course selection and other events, many of the club’s ideas for fundraising events during seminar — like the Disney Lip Sync Battle planned for Wednesday, Feb. 3 — fell through. Still, club members were able to work around these conflicts and still pull a successful outcome out of the week.

“I was proud of our ability to keep working together and keep working through a lot of different surprises, so to speak,” junior vice president Ally Saab said. “There were a couple of little bumps in the road that we had to overcome, but I think everyone worked really hard. We had a lot of meetings and a lot of on-the-fly planning and a lot of compromising, for sure.”

After that hard work and planning, Gatapia said she is satisfied with the outcome and is proud of the club for working together to organize such a successful week of fundraising.

“Our school isn’t the best at fundraising, and we were questioning our ability to make our goal of $2,000, but after this week and making our goal and surpassing our goal, I’m just very proud of the fact that we were able to make this organization raise enough money,” Gatapia said. “I’m very excited.”