SOUTHAMPTON STUDENTS RAISE £1260 FOR SAS

Progress Events was a small organisation set up and run by students at Southampton Institute University College, as part of the Managing Leisure Operations module of their course. The team comprised of 16 members from either Outdoor Adventure Management & Maritime Leisure Management courses, our aim was to plan, organise and run a charity event.

Our aim to raise SAS’ profile with students in Southampton and help us raise some money for them. This small team of people helped us to market, promote, fundraise and decorate the whole operation.

Progress Events decided a themed ball would appeal most to the students of Southampton this ball later became named the SAS Hawaiian Classic. 

SAS was our selected charity as a number of team members surf, sail, windsurf and kitesurf, SAS is an excellent charity, we all use the water and we want it to stay clean and safe.

Progress Events was a new organisation and therefore we started with nothing, no money at all, for us to plan and run this charity event we would need some capital. A massive thanks must go out to the Progress Events Fundraising team of Dan. Steve and Sam, who came up with some novel ideas to help us raise money.

 The first fundraiser was named the mini event, as it involved parking a mini outside our university library and filling it with balloons and asking students to guess the number for prizes. This event helped us to raise £165 and increased awareness of SAS with the students. A big thank you to the team who stood outside the library all day in December.

The second fundraiser took the form of a sponsored waxing, which again was organised by our fundraising team. A huge amount of hair was taken for charity which included myself Jonny as team leader having my head bic razored for £100. Our total fundraising reached just under£400 to help us run the event. We were ready we had a location and some capital, we needed to decorate the place and sell some tickets.

A massive thank you must go out to Koas nightclub and its owners Bob and Irene who allowed us to have our event in their club and take all door ticket sales.

Thursday the 21st of April saw the entire team running around selling tickets and promoting the event with their black SAS Hawaiian Classic t-shirts on.

Hattie, Kelly and Jmac all did a superb job decorating the location and it looked like a real Hawaiian nighclub. Over 300 students attended the event all attracted by some amazing prizes all sourced by myself, thank you to our sponsors for donating all the amazing prizes. (Solent Sailboards, Indo Europe, Boards magazine, Surfers Path magazine, Extreme Sports World, Surfstore, Tushingham UK, Extreme Drinks, Tonix DVD’s, Ellis Brigham, Gul UK and Snow and Rock).

The night went really well, with Extreme drinks being handed out for free all night. There was only one real hitch on the night, the DJ’s who offered to play were all wide boys wanted to play hardcore drum and bass not what the occasion required.

Koas also created sewage a drink especially for the night that went down really well, it was brown in colour and had alcohol in it – that’s all I know.

After a small period of panick by myself, we drove home and collected every CD we could find and rushed back to the venue to start partying again. The D&B DJ’s were all sent home and Tommy 2 pints a mate of mine took over and played some amazing tunes for the rest of the night. For this reason Tommy was given the star prize of a brand new Indo Board, the other star prize a Da-kine heli pack donated by Extreme Sports World was given to the worst dressed person on the night, Manlove was his name and you have never seen such a bad pair of pants!!

It was an amazing night and in total the Progress Events team raised £1260 for SAS, an excellent total for a team that worked really hard. I have to say a huge thank you to Lois and Ross and my girlfriend Billie for helping me out a great deal and keeping me sane when things were going wrong. This is Jonny Day leader of Progress Events closing us down for this year, we may be back who knows.