Lacrosse the Nations at the University of Virginia started off strong this past August with the executive board recruiting over 15 new members to join the club. Our efforts for the semester focused on balancing between fundraising for the annual LtN Cup and youth volunteering efforts, namely the recurring six-week long lacrosse program held at the Boys and Girls Club of Charlottesville on Cherry Avenue. Because of the success of the Cherry Avenue program in past years, and with the new influx of volunteer members, a new program was extended to the Boys and Girls Club at Jouett Middle School through outreach with their program director. From the first week of October to the week before Thanksgiving, around four to five volunteers traveled to each Boys and Girls Club every week - Cherry Avenue on Tuesdays, Jouett on Fridays. For a time frame about an hour and a half, our volunteer coaches focused on getting to know the kids that frequently attended the program, while teaching them basic lacrosse skills, ultimately providing a new sport-related platform that allowed them to build their individual characters. Our Club at UVA plans to repeat this same six-week program in the spring of 2018, at both Boys and Girls Clubs, with hopes of adding multiple pop-up clinics during the spring that would be open to all Charlottesville youth community members.
In volunteering at the Clubs, we also realized that the equipment the Clubs had on hand were in pretty rough shape - some sticks had broken heads, others had ancient mesh. Lacrosse the Nations has generously offered to help with providing new sticks to replace these old and worn-down sticks that the Boys and Girls Club currently has in supply.
Fundraising for the LtN Cup within our Club at UVA was done primarily through individual efforts - and proved to be an amazingly successful endeavor. Of the over $1300 raised, the majority of what was raised came from individual members’ outreach to family, friends, and members of the lacrosse community. In addition to these individual efforts, a lump amount of $500 was also contributed through older funds raised from a 5k race and several student restaurant nights hosted by LtN at UVA. We hope to expand our fundraising to involve the club men and women’s lacrosse teams at UVA, and even local high school teams, in order to further solidify the Charlottesville lacrosse community.
Future plans for our Club, other than continuing our current volunteering and fundraising efforts, also include promotional and educational events to not only promote our organization, but to also educate UVA students on how to involve themselves in international service in an effective and worthwhile manner. Whether this is accomplished through an open seminar, guest speakers, or a university-wide presentation, we hope that our club can prove to not only be a fundamental piece of the international Lacrosse the Nations presence, but also a model for other college organizations with a focus on local and international service.