Thursday, February 2, 2012

Neighborho​od Run/Walk for Children's Hospital On Saturday Organized By Villa Students

Villa Academy Destination Imagination Team during their recent visit to Seattle Children's Hospital


Don't miss a fun Walkathon for all ages through the neighborhood on Saturday from 11-2pm, to benefit the Art and Music Therapy Programs at Children's Hospital.

The Fun Run/Walk has been organized entirely by a team of  seven 5th graders at Villa Academy through the Destination Imagination program, which as Megan, one of the members told us is "a creative problem-solving team that works together to identify and solve a wide variety of challenges."

Megan told us that the team has been meeting every week since the start of the school year to work on their project.  They spent some time at Children's Hospital researching needs before coming up with the idea to support art and music therapy for patients.

"One of the biggest rules in DI is that no parental "interference" is allowed so everything we've done has been our own ideas and our own work.  We think this rule is probably harder for our parents than it is for us" Megan told us.

The teams choose and complete one of seven categories for long-term projects and the Villa team chose to do a project in the "World Canvas" category, where the challenge is to identify a community need to support and come up with a way to help that need. 

Megan told us that: "From the start, our team knew that we wanted to raise money for Children's Hospital, but we didn't know exactly what we wanted the money to be for.  To learn more, we went on a tour at Children's Hospital and one of the people we met was an Art Therapist.

"After hearing about how important art and music therapy are to the patients at Children's, we decided that we wanted to raise money for art and music therapy.   After thinking about a lot of different ways to raise money, we came up with the idea to organize a fun run/walk."

The team will present their results, with other schools, in a regional tournament on March 3rd, and the Villa team looks forward to presenting the outcome of Satuday's fundraising event.

The fun run/walk will start at the Villa Academy and the route, a little over a mile, will take participants through the neighborhood around Laurelhurst Park and back.  People can run/walk as many times as they like. 

Tickets are $7 for a raffle ticket, $10 for a raffle ticket and custom event wrist band designed by the team or $20 for a raffle ticket, wrist band and custom event t-shirt designed by the team.  

"We're hoping for a great turnout and especially hope that lots of Laurelhurst kids can make it" Megan told us.

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