When Weinberg senior Julie Shen realized the magnitude of the destruction caused by the recent earthquake in China, which had killed more than 50,000 people, she was horrified.

Shen’s home province of Guizhou borders Sichuan, where the earthquake hit. The news worried Shen until she called family and learned that her relatives had not been affected. Aftershock forecasts were reported to have raised panic in Guizhou, but the nearly 8.0-magnitude earthquake did not cause much damage in the province.

“It was a couple days after [hearing about the earthquake] when it really started to get to me, when more pictures of it started coming out,” Shen said. “The pictures of it were just really, really horrible.”

Shen didn’t just grimace at the photographs of victims. She didn’t just donate to current relief efforts, either: She started her own effort on campus.

Shen’s fundraising effort for the victims of the Chinese earthquake began Tuesday morning at the Arch. With the help of other students, she collected donations and passed out flyers with information on how to donate online and volunteer with their group.

Until Saturday, Shen had expected one of the Asian-interest student groups on campus to start fundraising.

“After a week, I just hadn’t heard anything,” Shen said. “So I decided to just get something started myself.”

Shen sent out numerous e-mails to friends and created a Facebook group for the fundraiser. She waited to see how many people would volunteer to help out.

“I was checking if people signed up, obsessively, and looking at pictures from the earthquake,” Shen said about her night before the fundraiser began. “After it started, my heart kind of calmed down because a lot of people have been showing up to help.”

Later, the Chinese Scholars and Students Association, the Chinese Students Association, the Hong Kong Students’ Association, and Northwestern University Singaporeans and Friends all lent support.

Christine Shiqi Chen, an international exchange student at Northwestern, joined Shen’s Facebook group and expressed her gratitude.

“I’m actually from Sichuan and my whole family is still there. I don’t know what I can say,” she wrote on the group’s wall. “Just want to thank you all for doing this and being so supportive.”

Volunteers will collect donations everyday until Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Arch, and possibly at other campus locations, such as Kellogg. The group plans to turn the funds over to Red Cross Hong Kong or Red Cross China.

Although there were not enough volunteers to cover all of the planned locations for donation collection, the group has already exceeded their initial goal of $1,000 by about $100, as of Wednesday evening. Shen also expects an increase in volunteer participation.

“In the beginning, I was just going to donate money and call it quits,” Shen said. “But after looking at the terrible images, I felt like I had to do something more.”

“We got $565,” MAL president Sara Larson, a SESP junior, said. ASG offered no explanation for the discrepancy.

Larson, who was not MAL’s president last quarter, presented a one-page proposal with other leaders from her group detailing their contributions to the Northwestern community in the preceding year and what they planned to do with the requested funds. She admitted that the requested amount was ambitious for a new group, but said that knowing whether ASG was displeased with specific plans would have been helpful. Instead, ASG just sends out the allocations.

“They just publish it on this list, and then mail it out to everyone, which says the group name, how much they requested and then how much they were given,” Larson said.

“It’s kind of like a vicious cycle in a way,” she said. “The way that you get more funding is by asserting yourself on Northwestern’s campus and getting a lot more people to come to events and having really good events, but the way that you have those kinds of events is if you have more funding.”

ASG’s three-tier “status” system can be cumbersome, acknowledges McCormick sophomore Vikram Karandikar. Last week he was elected to the position of executive vice president, which deals with funding issues. The job requires working with groups such as MAL and others who are disappointed with their allocated amount of money.

“I understand the privileges that come with getting any sort of status or any other recognition, and I also understand the other side, you know, jumping through hoops,” Karandikar said. He said he gained empathy for student groups’ concerns and frustration about ASG during his campaign.

MAL was not only disappointed by the amount of funds they received from ASG in the winter, but also where the rest of the funds were going.

“Most of it goes towards theater groups, toward DM,” Larson said. “It looks like those groups get a lot more than academic groups like us.”

Currently, A-status groups get 97.5 percent of the total student activities fee, while B-status groups get the remaining 2.5 percent, according to Karandikar. T-status groups are temporary groups that are ineligible for funding and must apply for B-status within one year of initial recognition from ASG.

According to ASG’s status-recognition application, A-status groups are those that demonstrate a clearly defined structure, group stability, financial stability, a need for funding and a direct benefit to the student body. Only B-status groups can petition for A-status upon demonstrating the above criteria for three academic quarters. There are 37 A-status groups, 56 B-status groups and eight T-status groups currently listed on the ASG student group directory.

Karandikar ran on a platform that promised to increase the percentage of funds allocated to B-status groups.

His goal as executive vice president is to increase that amount to 3 or 3.5 percent, Karandikar said. He said he realizes that the increase is modest, but plans to draft an initiative that would allow his successors to continue to increase that percentage. This past winter was the second official funding cycle for B-status groups. Before, funds were only allocated to A-status groups.

But not all groups are frustrated with the system, even if it doesn’t always match funding desires.

“We didn’t get the full award amount that we requested, but we were definitely happy with what they gave us,” Dance Marathon co-chair Tara Corrigan said. DM was ASG’s top-funded B-status group, receiving $2,000.

The Communication senior also said that she was very happy that ASG assigns a group executive to each student group to help the group complete ASG processes for funding and maintaining its status. She said that without the group executive’s help, the process could have easily become overwhelming.

Communication junior James D’Angelo said that the funding levels aren’t the only ASG practices that can lead to frustration.

“There’s a lot of paperwork and red tape you have to follow,” D’Angelo said. “I don’t know that it actually encourages or helps student activities on campus, which is what it’s there for.”

D’Angelo is a leading member of College Republicans, Special Olympics and Students for Saving Social Security. The groups are respectively A-status, B-status and T-status, covering the spectrum of ASG recognition.

D’Angelo said that his biggest frustration is “getting across merit” — proving to ASG that your group deserves funding.

“They base all of their allocation of merit on previous events,” D’Angelo said. “For example, how good the event is, how well publicized, how well attended … but, to me, merit is a little more broadly defined than what is often considered.”

D’Angelo explained that the College Republicans shows merit in its distinctive position as a conservative student group on a liberal campus.

“While there are less conservative students that go out to events, I think it’s important to note that that’s the only venue for those people to see events that align with them,” D’Angelo said.

Getting a share of the ASG funding pie is, of course, the big reason why student groups bother to prove merit to the organization.

“Just because you get B-status doesn’t mean they’ll hand you over money afterwards,” said Weinberg sophomore Taylor Kirch, president of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws-Students for Sensible Drug Policy (NORML-SSDP), which gained B-status last week. “We’ll have to apply [for funding] next winter.”

The siren is one of the university’s recent efforts to improve emergency warning systems on campus, and comes less than two months after a former student shot and killed five students at Northern Illinois University.

Sirens will sound on the first Tuesday of every month at 10 a.m., when the municipal outdoor warning systems in Illinois are tested, and follows an initial test last Thursday.

“It went well last week, and it went well this week,” said Charles Loebbaka, the director of university media relations. “So, the test was successful.”

Juliana Farley, an Allison resident and a Communication freshman, said she is glad to see the testing taking place, but thinks she and other students may be bothered by the 10 a.m. alarm, clearly heard inside the dormitory

The sirens sounded from speakers mounted on the roofs of four campus buildings, according to a press release: Allison Hall, the Donald P. Jacobs Center, Tech and Harold Anderson Hall. A non-emergency message followed the siren.

The system is in place to alert those who may be outdoors when a campus emergency occurs. Students, faculty and staff will also be notified through telephone, e-mail and text messages.

Alexandra Petrakos, a Weinberg freshman and a resident of Allison Hall doesn’t think the alarm will bother students. She views the tests as necessary “so that in case of an emergency everyone can be alerted properly.”

“The only way that they can make sure that everything is being kept up properly is if they test it every month,” Petrakos said. “I think it’s for the best.”

In this video: Michael Haas, Medill sophomore; Brendan Flannery, Communication sophomore; Katey Rusch, Medill sophomore; John Le, SESP junior; Alysa Teichman, Medill junior;
Anna Yan, Weinberg senior.

Footsteps in Hope was founded by Coleclough, a 2007 Northwestern graduate, after her return from Africa last summer. She was driven to support the prevention of AIDS after losing two people whom she had grown close to in Zimbabwe to the epidemic.

As a new student organization, the group chose to focus on a walk-a-thon for the year.

“This is about working together with the community to empower change,” Coleclough said.

Footstep’s walk-a-thon is meant to raise awareness and build resources to improve health care and HIV treatment education in impoverished areas around the world. The walk is 8 kilometers long – one meter for every person who dies in a day from an AIDS-related illness – and the course will be in the shape of an AIDS ribbon, if the site allows for it. Participants hold a candle during the walk and at a vigil afterward to represent hope and renewed opportunity for life.

“I think [Northwestern has] a pretty active community in things like public health and health education and global affairs,” said Weinberg sophomore Caitlin Brown, one of the group’s volunteer coordinators. “So we decided to kind of tap into that.”

Footsteps has a 21-and-over fundraiser this Thursday night at the 1800 Club. Group members will accept donations of five dollars at the door from attendees and three dollars from those who register for the walk-a-thon.

Registered fundraisers may work in teams of five to 10 people to raise 10 cents for every meter of the walk, for a total of 800 dollars, to become a “supporter.” Those who raise one dollar for every meter of the race, for a total of 8,000 dollars, become “benefactors.”

Half of the money raised in Footsteps’ fundraising efforts will go directly to a clinic in Zimbabwe which regularly treats HIV patients, while 30 percent of the proceeds will benefit local health care programs. Another 20 percent will cover the operational costs of the walk-a-thon, which will most likely take place in Chicago’s Grant Park, although the location has not been finalized.

Until recently, Footsteps in Hope has mainly sought out financial support from organizations. Globe, another student group committed to advancing awareness of global issues, will cover some of Footsteps’ operational costs. Footsteps has tried to raise awareness among NU students recently through painting the rock Feb. 21 and promoting their upcoming fundraiser and recruiting events.

“This is a really unique organization in how it deals with HIV/AIDS,” said Footsteps co-chair Dara Carroll, a Weinberg sophomore. “There are a lot of organizations that just support the global cause, mainly the African cause, or just support the local cause. The way that [Coleclough] has integrated the local and global is really important because it gives the people in the community the right perspective. It gets the focus off it just being an African issue so people can understand that it’s an issue that they need to deal with in their own community.”

The Northwestern Jazz Ensemble’s latest recording signifies a great accomplishment of the students and faculty of the jazz department to director Joel Spencer. The album’s title, Extra Credit, fittingly brands his sense of their achievement.

“All the hard work and the efforts and the talent levels that our students possess is just so obvious when one hears the record,” Spencer said.

Extra Credit, the title track, was composed by Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Jim McNeely. According to Spencer it also describes the challenge that the students took on when recording the album in a five-hour session.

“In many ways, they experienced the world of a professional studio musician,” Spencer said, “[The students] really rose to the occasion.”

Spencer views performing and recording as “two of the most valuable experiences for anyone in music to have.” While the debut performance was Friday, the ensemble recorded it in May 2007 at Shure Performance and Listening Center.

Shure, located in Niles, has a partnership with the School of Music in which the studio offered free recording sessions to the school “to demonstrate the tonal differences between different microphones” of their KSM microphone line, according to the studio’s Web site.

The collaboration with the NU jazz ensemble occurred after the School of Music’s director of concert activities, Richard Van Kleeck, passed on the previous year’s ensemble recording, Jazz Spoken Here.

Music senior and pianist for the ensemble, Joshua Moshier, is proud of the album, but wishes that the School of Music would do more to promote it. He believes that the lack of promotion is related to the dismissal of the current jazz faculty, at the end of the academic year.

“None of us would be playing at the level that we’re playing at without the faculty,” Moshier said.

Spencer declined to comment on the lack of promotion saying that “the most important thing is the music and the welfare of our students.”

“Twenty five years from now, our students can say ‘wow, this is what I did in 2007,’” Spencer said, “Their musical voices are captured forever.”

One was a cancer survivor and another was a mother who lost her child to the illness years ago, but all represented the purpose of DM’s primary beneficiary, the Bear Necessities Pediatric Cancer Foundation.

More than 15 NU students, along with the friends and family of the organization’s members, came to the event.

Kathleen Casey, president of Bear Necessities, shared her story through a short video, and later in person when she took the stage.

“It took a little 8-year-old to look me in the eyes and say, ‘We can do things for other kids, mom,” Casey said.

Casey founded Bear Necessities in 1992, just one year before her son died from pediatric cancer. The foundation’s name is in memory of her son, Barrett “Bear” Krupa.

Communication senior Grant Suhs spoke about his battle with cancer. He was diagnosed on April Fool’s Day during his freshman year and his mother didn’t believe him at first. But later that day they rushed to the hospital to see him.

Suhs shared his experience of fear and depression during that time, but also praised organizations like Bear Necessities.

“Although I didn’t receive anything directly from Bear Necessities, I can definitely attest to the benefit of their services,” Suhs said.

Katie O’Malley shared the story of her daughter, Kelly, who was diagnosed with a rare pediatric bone cancer during her freshman year in college.

“Suddenly you’re hit in the gut and you can’t breathe, nor can you believe that this is actually happening to your child,” O’Malley said.

Part of Bear Necessities’ work is granting wishes, from hospital bedroom sets to celebrity meetings, to children with cancer, said Emily Gotcha, a child-care specialist and part of the foundation’s medical advisory council.

“It’s really important to see how Bear Necessities brings back those kinds of things that are normal in other kid’s lives, but really a sense of normality is lost when these kids are diagnosed,” Gotha said of the foundation’s Small Miracle Program.

According to Courtney Krupa, Bear Necessities’ director of community outreach, this was the third year that the foundation applied for DM’s grant.

DM executive co-chairs and Communication seniors Krysta Kauble and Tara Corrigan said that they began with 75 proposals and narrowed it down to three organizations for their executive board to choose from.

“Students are very, very excited [and] we’ve seen a lot of income coming in,” Kauble said about DM fundraisers.

Bear Necessities representatives plan to attend the dance marathon in March.