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Northeastern’s Greek Sing competition lights up summer at the Tobin Community Center in Mission Hill with a sizable donation.
More children from the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston and surrounding communities will be able to participate in camps this summer after Northeastern University sororities and fraternities donated over $24,000 to the Tobin Community Center.
Every spring, Northeastern’s Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Council host a dance and lip-sync competition called Greek Sing to raise money for a local charity.
This year’s event raised more than $24,600, which will be donated to the Tobin Community Center, one of the Boston Centers for Youth and Families.
When John Jackson, director of the Tobin Center, heard the news, he was surprised and appreciative of the Northeastern students.
“It’s perfect timing,” he says. “And we greatly appreciate the support. We absolutely do.”
The Tobin Center is planning to use the money to provide scholarships for children from 6 to 12 to attend a six-week summer camp that usually costs $500 per child.
“Most of our families are low-income households, families who are mostly headed by a single female, who would mostly have more than one child,” Jackson says. “Being able to have these monies available to provide scholarships is amazing for us. The last thing we want is parents have to make a decision to leave young kids at home because they can’t afford camp.”
This is the first time Northeastern’s sororities and fraternities rallied behind a single charitable cause, says Cameron Grandy, one of the organizers of the competition and a rising fourth-year student studying communications, media screen studies, criminal justice and international affairs.
In previous years, the winning fraternity and sorority from the dance and lip-sync events would make a donation to their chapters’ philanthropy.
“I always thought that wasn’t necessarily fair because everyone works just as hard,” says Grandy, who serves on the Panhellenic executive board as a vice president of programming. “So we just decided to give back to a Mission Hill organization … to make sure it was something that we all could relate to.”
Supporting the youth of Mission Hill is important to all Northeastern fraternities and sororities since many students live in the neighborhood, says Griffin Majer, another organizer of the event and a second-year student studying bioengineering.
“Being able to donate and help the people that live in Mission Hill is something that we care about a lot because they do so much for us,” Majer says. “That area provides so much housing and so many social things.”
The fundraising effort took four months and the response from the community was overwhelming. Beta Theta Pi and Kappa Kappa Gamma raised $4,951, followed by Beta Gamma Epsilon and Alpha Chi Omega, which raised $4,490.
“I thought it was going to be no more than $10,000, maybe $5,000 [total],” Majer says. “It made me just think about all the other possibilities of doing this next year and doing this for years to come and how much more money we could raise.”
The Tobin Center serves thousands of children and adults from Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Hyde Park and Roslindale, Jackson says.
The center offers a wide range of programming, including martial arts, fitness classes and basketball leagues. It has a community room, computer lab, gymnasium, batting cage, outdoor garden and stage.
During the summer camp children will spend 6 to 8 hours a day at the center. There is also an extended-day program for parents who are not able to pick up their children until 6 p.m.
“We provide breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks,” Jakson says.
Camp activities will include field trips and sports, 3D printing and computer literacy.
“We also do academic learning,” Jackson says, “just so the kids don’t have too much learning loss in the summer.”