Clock starts today for Heart of the Hawks campaign
Fundraising campaign runs through Friday in support of UND student-athletes’ exceptional commitment to volunteer service
Starting today, UND Athletics and the UND Alumni Association & Foundation are hosting Heart of the Hawks, a fundraising campaign created to fuel UND student-athletes’ culture of service.
Last year, UND student-athletes completed 5,352 hours of service, earning national acclaim. This year, Heart of the Hawks organizers are rallying behind the student-athletes’ commitment to supporting our communities by implementing a 72-hour online giving campaign that will provide North Dakota Athletics with priority need funds.
The first-ever Heart of the Hawks initiative will run today through Friday, March 16-19. People who’d like to take part are invited to visit UNDalumni.org/hearthawks.
By the way, the above-mentioned “national acclaim” assertion is real. It stems from the following:
“As announced by Helper Helper – a subscription service that tracks high schools, universities, and nonprofits’ community service hours and community impact – UND women’s soccer, men’s basketball, and hockey led the country in community service at the Division I level in their respective sports,” UND Athletics reported back in May.
“While these Fighting Hawks programs are receiving top-billing for their commitment to service, they only scratch the surface for the Fighting Hawks Athletic Department’s commitment to service.
“Volunteering a total of 5,352 hours with an economic impact of $136,098, according to Helper Helper, 12 of North Dakota’s 17 teams finished in the top-10 in the country in community service hours and impact. UND had the second-most teams in the top-10 behind the University of Michigan’s 15.
“As a result of the department’s culture of giving and service, the University of North Dakota finished third nationally in Helper Helper’s final Division I standings and was the top-ranked FCS school. It’s the second-straight year that North Dakota has ranked in the top three.”
The following videos were created by UND Athletics and the UND Alumni Association & Foundation to support the Heart of the Hawks campaign. Katie Bierstedt, the subject of the first video, is a UND senior, athlete and servant-leader. She performed more than 100 hours of community service in 2019-20:
Bentiu Panoam from Anchorage, Alaska, is a UND senior and point guard on the men’s basketball team. On the team, “it’s practice, practice, practice, and then once we get that time to just relax and go help people, you just see a different kind of connectivity,” he says:
And Matt Russell, a UND senior who is the current president of UND’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC). Russell also represents the Fighting Hawks as a part of the Summit League’s Service Committee, where he collaborates with other schools around one unifying purpose: serving others.
In this video, Matt shares how UND student-athletes continued serving through a challenging year:
