November Dancer of the Month

November’s Dancer of the Month is Lauren Mattson!

Lauren is a Sophomore General Music major. Creativity and years of collecting with her family really sparked her fundraising for this year. She and her family have been collecting Build-A-Bear Animals since she was about 8 years old. They had over 50 bears which she decided to sell at a craft and vendor sale in her hometown. "My mom suggested out of the blue ‘Oh you should sell the animals at the fair,’ and I thought ‘Oh my gosh we need to give it all to Dance Marathon!’ It was a huge success, we are still selling some, even as of this week we are selling some that we didn’t sell at the fundraiser. We are up and around over $800 just from that!"

Her Build-A-Bear fundraiser was the reason she was nominated by her morale captain Jessie Wulff who said "Lauren is an amazing dancer she loves each one of our kiddos and is not afraid to show it! She is committed 100% to ending childhood illness!”

Lauren’s goals for the rest of the year is to see just how much money she can raise. Her initial goal of $1000 dollars seemed like something above and beyond what she thought she could raise, but as of this blog post, she’s only $120 away!

Lauren has a few of her fundraising ideas up her sleeve for over winter break "I wanna do these Carol-O-Grams when I go back home. I have a group of friends who I was in choir with in high school. I wanna get a few of us together and people can order Christmas Carols to send to their friends and we’ll go sing for them.” Not only would she be raising money from the people who order the Carol-O-Grams, but she will be also getting the message out about Dance Marathon to those receiving the grams.

When it comes to fundraising, Lauren’s advice is to keep moving forward. “Get as creative as possible! Have fun with it and keep doing whatever you can. Not every fundraiser will be a huge hit Try not to get discouraged and know that everything you’re doing is for the kiddos.” Keep on rocking FTK Lauren!