Walking past Rudder fountain this week, students will see Aggie Habitat for Humanity’s spring fundraiser and living billboard – a village of shacks that has emerged on campus for the past 13 years.
Shack-a-thon is Aggie Habitat for Humanity’s spring fundraiser, which seeks a yearly goal of $40,000 that goes toward the cost of building a house.
“Every year we raise $40,000 to sponsor a house for the Bryan-College Station Habitat for Humanity,” said Eric Baken, co-director of special events and junior biomedical engineering major. “Previously we haven’t been able to raise quite $40,000 every year but we’ve been doing better this year so we definitely should be able to sponsor a house in its entirety.”
Junior university studies major and member of the Corps of Cadets Glen Minor said his Company, C-2, has participated in Shack-a-thon for four years.
“We’re happy to do this. It’s a lot of fun and a great opportunity,” Minor said. “It’s one of those things that you probably get more out of it than is even advertised – you give back but you also just build bonds, leadership, do some practical work and just enjoy our time out here.”
Co-director of special events and senior biology major Nikki Schrock said Shack-a-thon helps raise awareness of the organization’s mission – helping to eliminate poverty housing.
“A lot of the homeowners for Habitat, they’ve either lived in homes that were too small or too crowded or in an unsafe environments,” Schrock said.
The inspiration behind Shack-a-thon is to give participating organizations the opportunity to build something, Schrock said. The event is not meant to be a poverty simulation.
“We do want to stress that this is not a poverty simulation,” Shcrock said. “We are just trying to raise awareness our purpose and what we do – we put deserving families in homes and we’re raising money for it.”
Senior aerospace engineering major and adviser of McFadden dorm, Grayson Helmreich, said the dorm enjoyed fundraising before organizations began the construction phase.
“We held a beard auction,” Helmreich said. “So anyone has the opportunity to grow it out as long as they can. Whoever [‘wins’ the beard] gets to do whatever they want to it whether it’s shave it, dye it, cut it – whatever they want and you have to have it for a weekend.”
Schrock said it’s really meaningful when enough money is raised by Habitat for Humanity to build a new home for a family.
“It’s kind of an experience that you can’t explain until you’ve been there, but just the look on a homeowners face during a wall raising when it goes from just a blank slab to the skeleton of the house,” Schrock said. “The homeowners are always so grateful and so kind and caring and kindhearted.”