February 11, 2019
Around 100 merrymakers attended the Winter Charity Gala hosted by the UNICEF Student Team Amsterdam and Enactus VU at CREA Café on Saturday, February 9.
The donations given for the event will be sent directly to a school in Aleppo, Syria. With CREA’s music hall successfully filled for the event, the event raised up to 801€ that evening.
“We feel privileged and lucky that we can contribute to this cause” said Lena Hoffmann, a 22-year-old German PPE student at the VU and the chair of the UNICEF Student Team in Amsterdam. “There’s a lot of things you can do without a lot of means with other organizations.”
The gala was sponsored by several companies that share a similar societal mission. The social and dating application Bumble, which aims to empower women, donated the alcohol and the restaurant Instock, which fights food waste, donated the food. About 290€ worth of alcohol were served in an open bar during the event.
The Awareness Committee came up with the gala as a new way to raise funds and awareness about the current situation in Syria. After three months of planning, Hoffman admits it turned out to be better than she expected. “People are interacting with each other… it feels cozy.”
“As a collective, you can take action for the topics you’re interested in and make a change for injustices, [and] encourage people to add social value,” she added. After the success of the Gala, the UNICEF Student Team aims to continue organizing issue-specific events in the future
“We wanted to create a network between people interested in human rights and social entrepreneurship,” said Nina Fistal, a 20-year-old media and information student at the UvA, UNICEF ambassador and Enactus board member. Landal Greenparks, another sponsor of the event, provided the raffle tickets, in which the highest prize was a night in a bungalow worth 350€.
After an introduction of the UNICEF Student Team and the gala’s sponsors, the rest of the evening was open for socializing and dancing.
Isabel Bonnet is a 21-year-old second-year student in communication science at UvA. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Amsterdammer. Before its creation, she worked as a photo editor at the Independent Florida Alligator and did an internship at Le Monde.
