College group will use prize money to help in Honduras
FREDERICKSBURG — A University of Mary Washington student group that helps impoverished children and families in Honduras won $20,000 in a national contest yesterday.
The GrabLife GiveLife contest, sponsored by Dodge, also gives Students Helping Honduras a boost in its campaign to raise $100,000, which university officials say philanthropist Doris Buffett’s Sunshine Lady Foundation has pledged to match.
The contest required computer users to cast votes, with the prize going to the first group to receive 20,000 votes.
Shin Fujiyama, a Mary Washington senior from Falls Church, said the group’s approximately 60 members plastered the Fredericksburg campus with fliers and spread the word through e-mails, on the online social networking site Facebook and by visiting classrooms.
“Professors gave extra credit for people who voted. That really helped,” he said. “We did everything we could.”
Fujiyama met Buffett through a philanthropy course offered at Mary Washington. He founded the group last year with his sister, Cosmo, a senior at the College of William and Mary. Students there also voted.
Fujiyama was inspired to help more after he visited Honduras in 2004. In 2005, he traveled to Honduras three times. His sister, who worked on Habitat for Humanity projects in Latin America, visited him in Honduras in summer 2005. So far, he said, the group has built a school and helped orphanages.
Their next fundraising mission is Walkathon for Hope 2007. They estimate that if they are able to raise $200,000 with Buffett’s matching grant, they can build 72 homes in a refugee village.
For more information, visit www.studentshelpinghonduras.org.
