The Finance Committee's arrival on the stage is usually met with a sigh of relief: The block is over and dancers can take their 10-minute sitting and sleeping break. But NBN caught up with the Finance Committee's co-chairs Sam Eastwood and Danielle Katz to hear what goes on behind the scenes until that final total is revealed.
How is DM going so far? Almost half-way done?
DK: It’s good. We’re excited to be here, can’t believe it’s already happening and we’re already halfway through.
How has being finance co-chairs lived up to what you expected it to be?
SW: Overnight’s always slow for us. We get money initially at the beginning of the night. And then we go through lockdown overnight and that’s kind of slow. We’ll get money today from visitors, and teams are out canning, still fundraising, so we’ll get money later today. But it’s been great so far, kind of what we expected.
So it supposed to get kind of crazy at the end?
SW: Not like crazy, people bring in money around dinnertime. Some of the teams who are dancing will send other members out to go canning, they’ll bring out their money that they fundraised throughout the day from other select sources.
DK: So it’s nice, we get to enjoy dancing in the tent. It’s a lot of fun.
What job has been taking up the most of your time?
DK: We ran check-in, so when all the dancers arrived, our committee was there checking them in, giving them dancer numbers. So that was a fun process, but that was probably the brunt of our work so far.
What do you hope is the legacy you leave on to the next finance chairs?
SW: We helped build fundraising relationships especially between new dancers, freshmen in the Northwestern Dance Marathon community. We try to pair older dancers with people on committees, returning dancers with newer dancers to help them figure out ways to fundraise, ways to reach $400. It seems like a daunting goal sometimes to new dancers, they don’t understand how fundraising works, so it works to really provide them with resources, fundraising guides, and a lot of initiatives we’ve done have just connected people in the community with younger dancers.
DK: Our main goal is that everybody who wanted to dance could dance because [of] the resources to fundraise and make it in the tent.
