Dance Marathons have been a prominent event at Big Ten schools for years, bringing together different students, groups, Greek affiliations, and more for a larger cause. At these events, students stay on their feet for 12 or more hours to dance and raise awareness and money for Children’s Miracle Network and children’s hospitals while visiting with ‘miracle’ children that come to the event. The University of Illinois’ dance marathon has been growing recently in hopes to one-day reach the likeness of events like the ones at Penn State, Indiana, and Iowa.

IlliniThon, U of I’s version of Dance Marathon, took place on April 18th this year. The 2015-2016 President, Bailey Burns, is working towards that goal of making this one of the most prominent annual fundraisers at Illinois. She said that this year there were over 500 student participants that, together, raised $130,314.73. In regards to how Illinois stacks up to the rest of the Big Ten, she said, “Our event is smaller than Iowa, Northwestern, and Penn State – however, we just finished the 7th year of IlliniThon. Some of the other Big Ten Dance Marathons have been around for 30-50 years. Since we are a newer organization, we’ve been slowly growing. Over the past two years we definitely made large strides and we have even bigger plans for next year, by increasing participation in the Greek community and gaining more support from the local businesses.”

Bailey said that she wants to reach out to more philanthropy chairs for organizations because once individuals really understood what the event was about, they were excited to participate. Since IlliniThon is newer at U of I, it takes more outreach to groups to get more people to participate. She also thinks that, the way the event has grown within the past few years, the total money raised will be tripled within the next 5 years.

At the end of the day, each year the Big Ten has been making a massive difference in helping benefit Children’s Miracle Network – “dancing for the kids that can’t.”

FTK