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Coming Up! Circle K Service Day November 3-4 What will YOU do with your extra hour? Come check out Circle K’s annual Circle K Service Day (CKSD) on
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Circle K Service Day November 3-4
What will YOU do with your extra hour?
Come check out Circle K’s annual Circle K Service Day (CKSD) on November 3-4. As you know, CKSD is a full 24 hours of service. But guess what? This year CKSD falls on Daylight Savings so we have 25 hours of service!!! The purpose of CKSD is to show people how much can be done in just one day. This year’s goal is to have 115 service opportunities available, 450 participants, 40 student organization collaborations and an average of 6 hours of service per participant! If you’d like to participate in CKSD in Ann Arbor, make sure to sign up on CKSD Website OR… participate in CKSD in your own town by doing a service project and telling us about it! |
Big Ten Food Fight
Hurry! It ends November 3rd!!!
Exciting news, Circle K Alumni! From now until Saturday, November 3rd, the Big Ten Food Fight is taking place! This is an annual competition between Big Ten schools to see who can bring in the most perishable and non-perishable canned food items for the entire week. The Circle K clubs of Indiana, Ohio State, Purdue, MSU, Penn State, Michigan and Wisconsin-Madison are all participating, and you can help as well! Ways to take part include Trick or Can, Circle K Service Day's Food Drive, and the You Give Goods online food drive, if you can't donate in person. To find out more information about how you can participate, check out umcirclek.org/b1gfood.
Written by Hunger & Housing Committee Member Alex Theuer |
Kiwanis Family Spaghetti Dinner
November 9th! 5:00pm-7:30pm
Enjoy a home cooked spaghetti dinner as we partner up with Ann Arbor Downtown Kiwanians to support the ELIMINATE project! The ELIMINATE project is an initiative of Kiwanis International and UNICEF to eliminate maternal neonatal tetanus (MNT) from the world.
Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door. Last year, we raised nearly $1200 from this event (including a 50/50 raffle!!) and had over 125 Circle Kers and Kiwanians who teamed up for good food, good company, and a donation to a great cause! |
Committee System
Fun Fact: Did you know that Circle K now has 2 Vice Presidents? Yupp that’s right. And we now have 13 committees! Allow me to name them for you: Children’s, Health & Wellness, Elderly Outreach, Hunger & Housing, Environment, IR (International Relations), LEAD (Leadership, Education, and Development), Fundraising, KFAM (Kiwanis Family Relations), PR (Public Relations), Historian, MD (Membership Development) and Technology. If you got tired just reading all of those, then you understand why we now have two VP’s: Internal and External. We’ve mixed the whole cluster idea and instead just have the two circles. The External Circle includes the service committees along with IR and LEAD, while the Internal Circle is composed of all the other committees. Feel free to investigate committees that are unfamiliar to you by clicking here. |
Projects & New Ideas
International Relations Committee Highlight
IR, whose focus is on developing events and projects with our service partners like UNICEF, Better World Books, March of Dimes, Six Cents Initiative, etc…, has come up with really innovative ideas this year. First up, the October Circle K Water Challenge. It’s a month long challenge where participants pledge to only drink tap water so as to support our international service partner The Six Cents Initiative (they strive to provide children around the world with clean water). If you drink anything but tap water, you have to donate the amount to the Six Cents Initiative that you spent on that consumed beverage. It’s a win-win basically. If you drink water you are filling your body with good fluids and raising awareness around you, and if you drink another beverage, you are donating to a good cause. |
IR has also recently set up a bi-weekly project with the March of Dimes (whose mission is to “help moms have full-term pregnancies and research problems that threaten the health of babies”). Volunteers learn more about the organization by doing office work at the local March of Dimes chapter. |
House Cup Challenge!
Shana'e Clark, current LEAD chair describes what the House Cup Challenge is:
The House Cup Challenge is to promote Service, Leadership, and Friendship within committees across our club. Members are randomly sorted among 4 philanthropic houses: Phoenix, Jenkins, Cook, and Penny.
Phoenix House is named from a project born in 1957 at the University of Michigan as a living memorial to the 585 alumni, students, faculty and staff from U of M that lost their lives in World War II. The aim of the Phoenix project is to discover positive benefits from nuclear power. Jenkins House is named for Phil F. Jenkins, who has been actively involved in the Depression Center since its inception, and funds a research grant yearly to spur creative advances in the treatment and self-management of depression. Cook House is named after William W. Cook, who generously donated $20 million dollars in 1930 to create the Law Quadrangle. Cook was dedicated to the pursuit of legal research and the attainment of higher education for all. Finally, Penny House is named after Penny Stamps, a 1966 alumna together with her husband who donated substantial funds to U-M's School of Art and Design. A school on North Campus now bears their name.
House members will attend service projects and socials together to earn points for their house. Led by a House Leader and House Advisor, members of each house create cheers, attend small and large scale socials, and get a chance to make our club a little more intimate. |
Peace Neighborhood Project
This new project is described by Children's Committee Member CJ Smith:
The Peace Neighborhood Center helps many families around the Ann Arbor area through a variety of different programs and activities. Their primary goal is to take care of the children of the community in after school programs and help these children develop long lasting friendships and good study habits. Although much of their focus is on the children, another goal is to provide much needed relief for their families who are experiencing difficult social and economic problems. Ultimately, the Peace Neighborhood Center is a place where kids can go to have a fun time and learn lessons that will help them later on in their lives. |
Kickin’ it up a notch with PRing
For our mass meetings this semester we had some amazing designs for flyers, banners and diag boards. Check out these neat designs! |
Waste Sorting
Waste Sorting is a project that only comes around every 5 years. General Member Jon Miela shared his experience:
The Waste Sort is this project in conjunction with the city of Ann Arbor. We went to their garbage dump/recycling center and got to participate in the sorting of various goods. This helped to teach me and the other Circle K people what really can and can’t be recycled. Did you know you can’t recycle bottle caps? Did you know you can recycle a lot of other things? I learned that a lot of people enjoy fine wine (wine bottles are recyclable), and we found a dirty diaper (ew)! You can’t recycle those!! We saw a lot of paper, and it was almost the most abundant thing there, and I also found an empty can of Monster Energy of the same flavor I had had that morning!!! They said that the truck delivered that day’s load the previous Friday, so the excitement faded a bit. We got to eat good pizza, cold and creamy decadent desserts, and they gave us new, cool, and free water bottles! I would definitely do this again, recommend it to other people, and hope that you get to see giant blocks of compacted recyclable goods!!! |
Kiwanis Highway Clean Up
The Highway Clean Up is a project we are thinking of doing more often this year. Alex Novo, this year's KFAM chair, shares her experience:
At the highway cleanup, members of Chelsea Kiwanis and Circle K helped remove garbage from the sides of I94 and M52. We were divided into groups of 2-3 people due to safety, and I was in a group with Zach Gizicki and Marcus Bodner. Zach and I are both in woody plants (a class), and every couple of minutes we would stop to investigate the different trees on the side of the road while Marcus got farther and farther ahead of us. At one point I was in the middle of a large patch of small trees/shrubs, and Zach said, "Alex, I think you're standing in poison sumac right now..." Luckily it either wasn't poison sumac or I'm not allergic to it. It was a lot of fun getting to learn about the plants. |
Fall Rally
This year's Fall Rally was Harry Potter Themed! Historian Committee Member Katie Rokakis talks about it here:
This was my first time attending Fall Rally, and it was a really great experience. I got to bond with people from my own club, and meet lots of awesome people from across the state. We did so much over the course of the weekend that it's hard to pick a favorite part. We made dog toys out of old t-shirts, had a hypothetical auction, and even went on a spooky tour around the haunted lodge. I learned more about what it means to work as part of a team and give back to the community, while having a ton of fun at the same time. |
Trick-or-Can
Halloween Oct. 31 5:45pm-8:15pm
Every year, Circle K's Hunger & Housing Committee holds its own food drive on Halloween, called Trick-or-Can! Instead of asking for "treats" they go trick-or-treating for "cans." That means they went door to door collecting canned goods and non-perishable food items!
Last year we collected 1,816 pounds of food (= 1,513 meals!) and had 62 participants. Last night we had around 88 participants! All of the food collected will be donated to Food Gatherers, Ann Arbor's local food bank! |
We’ve really been working hard this year to increase alumni relations, show appreciation for the work you have done to get us to where we are today and to remain in contact with YOU! Let us know what we can continue to do to keep this friendship going by contacting Alexandra at amkal@umich.edu with any and all ideas.
We are in the process of creating an alumni recognition page on the Circle K Website. If you would like to be featured on the Circle K Website as an alum, please contact Alexandra at the above e-mail address. |
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