Psi Upsilon’s Pi Chapter at Syracuse raised over $46,000 for Movember and men’s health issues. Their team, “Boys Things”, ranked 9th in the country! We reached out to team captain Michael Dellon, Pi ’17 to learn about their team’s history and how they achieved this high level of success.
In 2014 the Pi had a small Movember team of around 5-7 undergraduate brothers. By 2015, they had grown the team substantially, first by encouraging heavy participation from undergraduate brothers. From 2014-2016, the team was totally comprised of undergraduate brothers. Once Michael graduated in 2017, he decided to make a team that was not just limited to undergraduate members and started to call on Pi alumni and friends outside the house to join the team. Michael says, “This is really when we started seeing the impressive fundraising numbers. Today, our team is comprised of undergraduates, alumni, and some of our friends. We now have about 70 people on the team, with well over half being Pi affiliated.”
Michael says his passion for Movember came from his own struggle with testicular cancer. “My battle with cancer put me out of commission for a full year between 2012 and 2013 and was actually the reason I transferred to Syracuse, as being in NY allowed me to be closer to my doctors and family. Unfortunately, in 2016 I lost my cousin to mental health issues, and in 2018, the Pi lost a brother to suicide. We were all devastated by this. After losses like these, we decided to dive deep into preventing male suicide and made that a pillar of our fundraising.”
By the time Michael left Syracuse and graduated, the team had around 25 members. He says, “I believe we raised $7k or so. Once we opened up the team to alumni and friends, we started to see our numbers shoot up. in 2018, we raised about $16K, 2019 was just short of $24k, and this year, the $47k you saw.”
“This year was a total team effort, but we were able to hit such high numbers due to a lot of story sharing. It is difficult to talk about a lot of reasons why Movember is important to us, but this year, the team really went all out in sharing stories of why this cause is so important. Also, as we become more and more knowledgeable about fundraising, we are finding new and unique ways to raise money and awareness.”
