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Sigma Alpha Iota (SAI), the women’s music fraternity at Pitt State, hosted a painting canvas fundraiser to help their newest member-in-training pay for their initiation fees.
The fundraiser was held from Tuesday, Sept. 29 to Friday, Oct. 2 and orders were placed via a Google Form. The organization is delivering orders of canvas kits through Saturday, Oct. 10. The canvas kits include a blank canvas, a painting set including paint brushes, and a set of paints, and detailed instructions on three specific designs including a Pittsburg State splitface and two tree designs.
The fundraiser was organized by senior in music and biology and treasurer of SAI Madeline Gay, and she says she is “pleased” with the results of the fundraiser.
“We’ve had 104 orders and that was way more than we were expecting,” Gay said. “We extended our delivery time because of that… We’ve had a lot of great engagement and everybody has been super excited about doing it…”
The paint kits each cost $5 and Gay said that the inspiration for the fundraiser came from a search online.
“We were researching about different ideas and our MIT (member-in-training) really resonated with the idea of doing paint kits..,” Gay said. “I asked her what kind of designs she wanted to do, and she came up with the gorilla splitface which only has two paint colors so it’s not that hard to do… a tree and field silhouette and they (those who order) can decide what color they wanted for the background on the landscape… and then, we had an autumn tree design with some reds, oranges, and yellows for the trees and the ground is really simple… We give them the kits and the instructions on how to do it, but it’s up to them to interpret that… We did that so there’s no danger of being copyright struck for the splitface or the tree design… It’s all about how they do the design…”
SAI, like many organizations on campus, has had to adapt operations based on health and safety regulations put in place at the university, city, county, state, and federal levels for the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We’ve handled it pretty well,” Gay said. “All of our meetings are online so we’re not meeting in person. That way we don’t have any cross-contamination if something happens. Otherwise, there’s not much difference. It does suck a little that we don’t have as much social aspect which we really found out during our recruitment week that on Zoom, you can really only have one conversation at a time which… makes it tough to get new members involved… that was the only thing that we found was negative about moving everything online…”
Other fundraising events that SAI is doing include their annual Penny Wars where members of the Pride of the Plains Marching Band donate their pennies for positive points and can “sabotage” other sections of the band with silver coins or dollar bills, and their Burrito Sale which will be held sometime in the near future.
