ACU’s Wishing Well chapter is continuing to raise awareness and raise money for their cause after making a statement in Chapel.
On Oct. 14, Mitchell East and the rest of the Wishing Well club hoped to get students involved in a cause they may have not previously known about.
Brandy Rains is the president of ACU’s Wishing Well chapter, which consists of about 15 members.
“Our goal for Chapel was to give students a tangible representation of something they don’t know about or see every day,” Rains said. “We hear the term ‘water crisis’ loosely on a list of issues, but it just isn’t a concept we can grasp because we don’t see the issue itself in our personal living conditions.”
During the Monday Chapel, East described what would happen in a typical ACU student’s day if there was no water to be found and illustrated conditions that many underdeveloped countries are faced with every day.
While East was speaking, students sitting on the floor got up two-by-two and walked out of Moody, giving a visual approximation of how many people die from water-related complications within the Chapel time limit.
“My leaders and I were having a meeting in my apartment when I stated that every 20 seconds a child dies from water-related diseases like diarrhea,” Rains said. “We kind of accidentally came up with making it into a demonstration and took it from there.”
After the demonstration, Wishing Well asked the student body to follow them on Twitter. They said an anonymous donor promised to pay $100 for every 100 followers gained.
The donor contacted Rains as an experiment to see what kind of positive change social media can make.
“We have over 1,300 followers and we only had about 130, not all of them students,” Rains said.
Thanks to hundreds of new followers, Wishing Well raised about $1,200 in a matter of 8 hours, Rains said.
The Wishing Well Twitter is still gaining followers and the club hopes to continue to raise awareness for their cause.
For more information, follow @ACUWishingWell on Twitter. Students can also get involved in the Wishing Well club by going to Bible 120 during Thursday Chapel.
