Spreading Smiles Beyond Campus Borders

By: AlShaimaa Nada

@NadaAlshaimaa

The AUC’s Student Union (SU) launched a brand campaign on September 6 called 50k smiles with the goal of collecting donations inside and outside the university all while drawing smiles on the faces of the ones involved.

The campaign first started with projects aiming to collect school supplies; pens, pencils, notebooks and water bottles, on and off campus. Such donations will then be given out to the students in need. 

Taher El Hemeily, the SU’s marketing and branding chairperson, said that the goal of the campaign is to fulfill 50k smiles either by entertainment or community service.

“For example, nowadays we are working on collecting donations for buying school supplies to give them to schools that are in poor areas. It’s part of the 50K smiles we want to draw,” Hemeily said.

The campaign also focuses on spreading its projects on social media platforms.

“To make our campaign more reachable to a larger number of people we asked the donors to post their pictures on social media having smile flashcards on their mouths,” Hemeily said.

The SU also launched another project called ‘Back2School Packs’ on September 16, which aims to gather donations to buy school supplies for children of AUC workers. 

SU Vice President Salma Ehab explained that they sent out a survey to the workers to determine what they needed the most. 

One of the general managers of the ‘Back2School Packs’ project, Nour Barakat said, “we reached out to the workers by getting in contact with their supervisors. With that, we had a database of workers, their names and number of children they have.”

“Our target is to draw 1,500 smiles by giving 1,500 school packs to the AUC workers’ children,” Ehab said.

Zeyad Srour, one of the general managers of the ‘Back2School Packs’ project and an electronic engineering student, told The Caravan that there was plenty of research that went into planning the launch of the campaign. 

“After a lot of research we found out that there are 800 workers inside the whole university and each worker has relatively two children that’s why we are targeting 1500 smiles,” Srour said.

Although the 1,500 smiles project is similar in nature to the 50K smiles campaign, the ‘Back2School Packs’ is a collaboration with other clubs and is not solely the SU’s project. It falls under the Student Social Responsibility team that focuses primarily on issues such as representing workers and students with disabilities. 

‘Back2SchoolPacks’ is collaborating with ISCL, Hand in Hand, 3al Raseef, Help, Glow, Volunteers in Action and Resala – most of which are community service based entities. 

“We chose to collaborate with those clubs in specific because they are community service clubs and we want people who are experienced in this manner to work with us,” said Barakat.