Community comes out for Orcas Island Heart Pledge Jog-a-Thon

by Laura Kussman

Contributor

What to do when an outpouring of community support for a good cause is met by a downpour?

That seemed to be the forecast in the sky on Saturday, March 26 during the first annual Orcas Island Heart Pledge Jog-A-Thon. At 9 a.m. on the new Orcas Island Public School track where 78 students and their families were checking in and setting off on their individual laps with the collective goal to raise funds for any local child with a special heart, the rain was starting to come down hard.

“You could see these crushing looks from all the runners, followed by this grit that came over them as they accepted that we were all in it together, out there getting soaking wet and working hard,” Heart Pledge organizer Rachel Wilson said as she shared her favorite moment from the day. “They loved it. That really added to the feeling of working hard to help someone else.”

For several students, grades K through 12, that grit led to walking or running over 50 pledge laps. Surprised parents and teachers made comments to each other about the number of laps their kids completed. 55! 66! Over the course of an hour!

“Is 54 laps a lot?” one elementary student asked a volunteer who stood underneath a pop-up tent offering a pit stop-style check-in for joggers. “Yeah!”

For 5th grader Carter Tilstra, that mettle translated into jogging 128 laps, or just shy of 32 miles over the course of 30 days. He was the top runner in the school, and one of the last of them on the track at 11 a.m. when the final lap was announced.

So how does logging laps on a track help financially support local children with special hearts?

The idea, born from Wilson but executed enthusiastically by over 40 teachers, staff and Booster Club members, was multi-purpose. Encourage and support local youth in a robust program centered around the heart and heart function, both structural and special alike. With an initial online study via the American Heart Association, students began to learn the basics of the human cardiovascular system alongside information about what Wilson calls “special hearts.”

“There are children in our community born with special hearts. We started to learn in the classroom about how they manage and cope with that and how they take care of their hearts knowing it needs that extra care.”

That transformed into the Orcas Island Heart Pledge Jog-a-thon fundraiser, where students were encouraged to gather donation pledges and start exercising their own hearts in the form of laps around the track. Each lap equated to the amount a donor offered to pledge for it. Some of the students received pledges for $1 per lap, other for $.50 per lap. Some were able to secure $5 per lap. And others sourced 5 different pledgers per lap who pledged $1 to $2 or $3, bringing in around $10 per lap.

“If they didn’t have any pledges, we also had about 38 staff volunteer as silent pledgers. If students signed up without a pledger, we assigned them a silent pledger. That way everyone who wanted to participate was able to,” Wilson said .”There was so much immediate support from our staff. As teachers, it’s been a rough couple of years. Our staff was invaluable, offering to be silent pledgers, showing up helped motivate the students to get out on a Saturday morning.”

Wilson said the event surpassed her expectations and went above and beyond what she could’ve imagined. She says next year it will be even better. The day was made even better when the sky broke and the sun began to shine, drying and warming joggers as they went.

All donations will go to the Orcas Resource Center into the “Special Heart Account” specifically to support any Orcas child with a special heart. The account welcomes any future donations.