Welcome to our DemonBLOG
Hello!! Welcome to the DemonTHON blog!! My name is Leslie and I am the Participant Relations Director for DemonTHON this year! Since we are all a bit more distanced than we would like to be right now, this blog will help give you an inside look at everything we are up to!
In case you are new to DemonTHON or Dance Marathon, here is a little run through of what we do. DemonTHON is a community of college students that have one common goal: we aspire to create a world where all kids can be kids. DemonTHON works year-round to raise funds and awareness for Ann & Robert H Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. All this work culminates to a 12-hour Dance Marathon to honor the patients and families treated at Lurie Children’s and to celebrate all the kids that get to just be kids thanks to Lurie Children’s.
DemonTHON works closely with Miracle Network Dance Marathon, a movement that benefits Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals is a non-profit organization that raises funds and awareness for over 170 pediatric hospitals across the United States and Canada. Miracle Network Dance Marathons have raised over $350 million dollars for kids since it was founded in 1991 and works to ensure that no family or child has to fight pediatric illness or injury alone. Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals partners with children’s hospitals across the nation to keep the impact local. As a Miracle Network Dance Marathon program, we support our local children’s hospital—Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago which is just 3.1 miles from the center of DePaul’s campus.
Since COVID-19 has turned the world upside-down, it has become abundantly clear to all of us here at DemonTHON that now more than ever it is crucial for us to come together and focus on the kids we are raising funds and awareness for. A large portion of the money we fundraise goes to making Lurie Children’s a fun, safe, comfortable place to children and their families to be. Many kids at Lurie Children’s have spent a majority of their life in the “quarantine” environment that we found ourselves in for just a few months due to their illness. Lurie Children’s uses philanthropic funds to design fun spaces for kids to have access to while they receive treatment. These spaces bring art, music and pet therapy to kids to enhance their healing process as well as teachers to keep patients on track in school while receiving treatment, Skylight TV for them to connect to each other, and an in-house beauty salon for patients and their families to use. For us, it is all about kids getting to have the most normal childhood they can have despite their diagnosis or injury. We want them to have more birthday parties, we want them to attend school with their friends, we want them to be able to go to school dances, we want them to be able to wake up at home in their own bed and not have to worry about getting stuck with needles or getting endless testing done. We want to fight to end pediatric illness and injury, so kids can just be kids.
Check out our social medias, especially on Mondays as each Monday is a Miracle Monday when we will highlight one of our Miracle families that DemonTHON supports!