Weekend race to raise funds for mentor program

More than 100 students, parents and community members will strap on their running shoes Sunday afternoon as College Mentors for Kids holds its second annual 5K run around campus. The event, beginning at 1 p.m. at the DeVault Alumni Center, will raise money and awareness for the program, which helps encourage disadvantaged elementary school children to someday attend college. \n"Kids get to experience college from an early age," said Laura Feldman, associate program director of the statewide program. "They learn about campus and about what is tough, but also what is wonderful about the college experience."\nHolding the 5K race will help defray some of the costs of running the program, which is offered free of charge to the elementary school students. Though College Mentors for Kids has received about $3,000 in various grants, the yearly budget runs about $13,000, including transportation and activity costs, Owens said. As a result, mentors have another job: raising the additional funds to keep the program up and running. \n"All mentors have to raise $200 each year," Caitlin Owens, president of the Indiana chapter of CMFK, said. "We do letter-writing campaigns to friends and family, canning outside of Kroger and even a sucker sale." \nThe idea of holding a 5K race sprang from the success of a similar event at Purdue, Owens said. \n"The race at Purdue sustains their program's whole yearly budget," Owens said. "Our race is something we are still working to establish, so it might be a while until we can say that." \nLast year, about 120 people signed up for the race, mainly mentors, other students and parents, Owens said. However, the race is open to the entire community. So far, about 100 people have signed up this year, but Owens said she hopes that allowing people to register on the day of the event will encourage more people to join. \nEven more importantly, the race will help raise awareness about the program, Feldman said. \n"We always encourage our chapters to balance their events so that it will have an impact and be fun, but also build awareness about CMFK," Feldman said. "A race is a great awareness builder because there are so many people running around, it is kind of hard to ignore." \nCollege Mentors for Kids pairs up a college student volunteer with a student from either Fairview Elementary in Bloomington or Unionville Elementary in Unionville, Ind., Feldman said. A bus picks up the students once a week after school and brings them to IU for an activity, such as community service, educational programs or diversity programming.\n"Each mentor has to come up with an activity for the group each semester," Andy Raduski, a first-year mentor in the program said. "This semester, I took the kids to the chemistry lab to see some cool experiments."\nThe children in the program are first- through fourth-graders deemed to be "at risk" and are usually recommended by their elementary school teachers, Owens said. Students are declared "at risk" based on their families' low income, usually less than $13,000 a year. The program also tries to focus on recruiting students whose parents did not go to college themselves, she said.\n"We want to get children college-oriented from a young age," Owens said. "We are trying to instill in them the idea that they can go to college, even if they don't have a lot of money or their parents or others haven't talked to them about it"