Students, faculty shoot hoops for measles
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Vision Xchange, a new student-run service and international aid organization, kicked off the semester with the second annual "Shots for Shots," a basketball tournament to raise funds for the African Measles Initiative.
After a week-long tournament of 12 student teams, Shots for Shots ended Friday, Feb. 24 when the winning student team, Hope Chapel, faced off against a team of professors. The professors won and claimed a 6-foot trophy as their prize.
Vision Xchange worked tables all week to gather donations for the African Measles initiative. Spectators were asked for a minimum donation of $1, enough to pay the $0.82 for one measles vaccination.
"We've been tabling all this week," co-founder senior Shruti Mathur said. "Every single time we table for about two hours we usually raise about $100. The other day we raised $140, just four people sitting at a table in Wolman, just yelling at people, telling them about the cause."
"It looks like we will reach well past $1,500 at this rate. I think that it went very well considering we barely had a week to get everything together."
Vision Xchange attempts to maintain a very low operating budget. Co-founder sophomore Salmah Rizvi explained, "We always work with a zero profit. The school doesn't give us money for the events themselves, so we are always asking all these sponsors to give us money.
"And when we ask these big corporate sponsors to give us money, they get out of their corporate lives, and they think about the rest of the world for a second."
Junior Susie Fawzi was one of the students manning the tables outside the basketball court. After hearing about Vision Xchange Fawzi said, "I thought it sounded like a really good idea. It's a really good organization. They know what they're doing."
The team of professors was also excited to win the tournament, since they lost to the student team after being fouled in the last 20 seconds of the game last year.
Captain of the team, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and Head of the Division of Reproductive Biology at the Bloomberg School of Public Health Barry Zirkin said he competed "because it's fun and because the cause is a good one, and we love playing basketball."
Mathur explained, "What we're trying to do is to raise awareness, because right now measles is the most preventable disease in the world. It kills more children than AIDS, but it just doesn't have the media attention. Right now there's about 600 kids every single day who are affected because of this disease. So we're really trying to raise awareness on this campus.
"It's all about doing large scale, fun, different events that people will come out to. And it's really great that it's for charity, too," she added.
With that goal in mind, Mathur and Rizvi launched Vision Xchange in the fall. The organization's very first event, Hopkins Top Model, raised $4,500 in ticket sales and donations for UNICEF's South Asia Emergency Relief Fund.
The John Robert Powers agency sponsored two $1,000 modeling prize packages for the Top Model winners, Sodexho donated food for about 400 people, and DJ RZ from Washington, D.C., who normally charges $5,000, played for free.
Shruti estimated, "We were able to get about $10,000 worth of sponsored items for Top Model and plan to work hard again to do the same for our upcoming events."
Rizvi described Top Model as not only a fun event, but as a means to unite different campus groups in support of their cause.
"We invited all the different student groups. So our mission was two-pronged: getting all those groups involved and by getting them involved, we're spreading the awareness of our cause. So that's one thing. The other thing is getting money," she said.
Mathur added, "This is our second event, just something a little different. That one was a totally different charity, a totally different crowd. This one is something that we'd done before and that we wanted to do again, because we're really passionate about the Measles Initiative."
For their next event, Vision Xchange plans to stage a mock American Idol contest. On March 9, they will hold auditions for College Idol, which may be a regional contest involving the greater Baltimore/D.C. area. Contestants will be asked to sing a song about love and peace, and the money raised will benefit child soldiers in Northern Uganda.
During Spring Fair, Vision Xchange wants to win Hopkins a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most number of couples on simultaneous blind dates.
They are hoping to gather 1,000 Hopkins students to break the current record of 268 couples held by the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Each participant will be asked to donate $10 for his or her dinner date and to help treat AIDS in the Baltimore area.
"There's just so much you can do internationally, but right here in Baltimore City there's not enough education, there's not enough money for relief," Rizvi said.
"We're not just an isolated community in the ghetto of Baltimore. There's a world outside of these gates of Hopkins where you can go and help kids who need your help."