Next time you see a guy with a particularly impressive mustache, supplement your admiration/envy/judgment by handing him a $10 bill. Because that ‘stache just might not be a questionable lifestyle choice, but a fundraising tool to benefit sick children in the D.C. area.

This ploy is the strategy behind Mustaches 4 Kids, a nationwide, volunteer-run organization that began in 1999, whose D.C. chapter is kicking off their mustache marathon with a “Shaving Day” party tonight from 6 to 8 p.m. at Georgetown’s Rhino Bar and Pumphouse. This event will include drink specials, wing specials, giveaways, and, of course, shaving, as the official mustache growing and money making begins tomorrow. This year, Rhino’s male bartenders are all joining in the cause, and the bar will be full of mustachioed men by the end of the month.

Although many of their events take place in bars, M4KDC strongly encourages Georgetown students to join the cause, which entails growing a mustache and collecting pledges from friends, family, and ‘stache enthusiasts. All proceeds go to the Children’s National Medical Center‘s Childrens National Kids Care Fund, which, according to M4KDC’s website, “responds to the basic needs of children’s healthcare.”

“Growing a mustache is an experience unlike any other, and we highly recommend it,” a M4KDC representative wrote in an email. “Especially for the scene it will cause at the family Thanksgiving table.”

To join the cause, visit M4KDC’s registration page.

Photo from Mustaches 4 Kids.

Joel Ziebel (COL ’10) wants to know: are you “Interested in chowing down on some Wingo’s buffalo wings, downing Red Bull, representing your student organization on Georgetown Day, competing against other Hoyas and faculty, and doing it all for a charity?!”

Yes, for $20, you and a teammate from a student club can compete in the first annual “Jack Wings,” a contest that, “at high-noon” on Georgetown Day, will pit your student group against another for fame and glory, turn you vegetarian, and all but guarantee that you’ll “Jack Wings” in the bushes immediately outside the Healy Gates in under an hour. (Guessing that’s what inspired the title).

The contest was conceived by Ziebel for a Reimagine Georgetown grant, which is sponsored by The Corp and is co-sponsored by The Hoya. He called it “Saxa Service Feast” and in November, won $2,000 for his idea.

And hey, all collected proceeds go to charity! So even though this sounds completely disgusting, our imaginations still ran wild with rivalries that could come to a head through this competition:

• SAC versus GUSA. Duh.

• College Dems versus College Republicans. Does Obama’s health care plan cover broken ribs from the Heimlich maneuver?

• ANC Commissioner Ron Lewis versus ANC Commissioner Aaron Golds (COL ’11). The winner gets to pass the 2010 Campus Plan in any form he chooses.

• Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson versus Provost Jim O’Donnell, for a special place in President John DeGioia’s heart.

• Georgetown, Divest! versus the Office of Investment. If the University wins, they get to invest the endowment only in socially irresponsible ways.

• Plan A Hoyas versus GU Right To Life. If Plan A wins, Georgetown has to allow condom sales on its property. If RTL wins, the condom-toting Jack O’Gioia leprechaun has to leave town, and never return.

To sign up, e-mail “Jack Wings Wingman” Joel Ziebel at JackWings2010@gmail.com. As for us, we’ll stick to our annual softball game against The Hoya, thank you very much.

This post originally stated that this contest was sponsored by Wingo’s, not Joel Ziebel and his Reimagine Georgetown grant.

If you’ve missed the enormous banners in Red Square, the countdown posters across campus, or haven’t figured out what all that purple glitter is doing in Red Square yet, tonight is Relay For Life. And with about $330,000 raised so far, the Georgetown chapter should just about match the amount it raised to fight cancer last year, $402k.

Relay probably won’t raise $500,000, nor meet the goal it set for itself of doubling last year’s take, but the amount of donations is almost 25 percent higher than last year and there are 400 more participants this year than in 2009. The American Cancer Society website RelayGU.org currently has 205 teams registered and 2,805 participants. And the Relay for Life fundraising chair, David Hammerman (MSB ’11) says that they only need to raise another $20,000 today, which he believes is “very doable,” to be even with last year’s event, which saw about $30,000 raised at the event and $20,000 after.

In light of the economic downturn, Relays at other colleges have seen a similar trend, of smaller donations from more people. Comparatively, however, Georgetown is doing extremely well and is second only to Virginia Tech, Hammerman said.

As for their “double your pleasure, double your fun” campaign to double last year’s net gain of $402,000, Hammerman explains that the campaign was more of a committee motivator. He says he’s not disappointed in Georgetown.

“Georgetown students, being so philanthropic throw their energy behind so many good causes [like Haiti and Chile relief],” he said. “While there may be less money to go around and be donated to Relay, the support from the student body has never been higher.”

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In February, the Georgetown chapter of Alpha Phi Omega entered the Pepsi Refresh challenge to try to win a share of the $1.3 million Pepsi had pledged to give service projects around the country. Turns out that they won, an e-mail from a Pepsi promoter sent on Thursday said—$25,000 to mentor one girl scout troop and one boy scout troop in an underprivileged D.C. neighborhood.

“The project’s goal will be to strengthen the troops and the community around them by providing much needed assistance on several levels: leadership, recruitment and financial assistance,” the e-mail said. “Over the summer, the chapter intends to send approximately 25 boys to Scout camp. In addition, [APO] set aside $10,000 that will go towards college scholarships for Girl Scout Gold Award recipients and Eagle Scouts.”

Five thousand dollars will also go toward uniforms and handbooks, $8,000 toward trips, and $2,000 toward service project supplies.

APO is one of dozens of service projects that have received money from Pepsi so far this year. Projects from Teach For America, which won $250,000, and a program to purchase 25 iPod Touch units for a gradeschool science lab, which won $5,000, were awarded money based on open voting. In February, APO’s project got the second-most votes in the $25,000 category.

There was no partisan rancor Wednesday night at Thurgood Marshall Elementary—just an annual basketball game for charity, where members of the Georgetown University Law Center’s faculty (team name Hoya Lawyas, naturally) beat members of the United States Congress (Hill’s Angels) 49 to 42 in an event that raised $371,953 for the Washington Legal Clinic for the Homeless.

The $370,000 that the event raised far outdid last year’s take of $335,000 and smashed Home Court’s $350,000 goal, media outreach chair George Chipev (SFS ’09, LAW ‘ 12), said. According to Chipev, the money raised through Home Court, which is now in its 23rd year, usually covers about a third of the Clinic’s operating budget.

Here’s the game roster—take a look and see if you Congressman was one of the Hill’s Angels who lost to Georgetown Law faculty. It probably helped the Lawyas that Reggie Love, President Barack Obama’s personal aide and former Duke basketball player, joined the Lawyas at the half, where the Angels led 28-18.

Photo by Alex Perry for Home Court

With about a month to go before Georgetown University’s Relay For Life and over $143,6000 raised already for this year’s Relay, the annual event will probably beat last year’s take of about $402,000 when all donations are tallied at the end of the fiscal year in August.

This year’s Relay fundraising team has also pulled in more individual donations than last year and expanded its outreach to other Georgetown campuses and the surrounding neighborhood.

“We have more people doing less,” Rachael Kenney (MSB ’11), an event chair for Relay, said. “The number of donations we’re seeing is way up, but they end up being smaller, which is a national trend. This happened at a lot of other Relays last year, which most people thought was due to the economy, but it did not happen to us until this year.”

The increased outreach that Relay’s board has been doing this year to the Medical School, Law Center, and surrounding Georgetown neighborhood has helped make up for the shrinking donations, Kenney said, with many donations in particular coming from the Medical Center, where many of last year’s board members are now studying. However, it’s not clear whether Relay can surpass its fundraising goal of doubling last year’s donations.

Earlier this week, when Kenney told Vox that Relay’s goal was to double last year’s goal, she added, “at this point, I hate to tell you, I don’t think that will happen.” In a follow-up e-mail today, however, she wrote, “I take back what I said about not being able to meet our goal—the momentum that has build this week is proving that this campus can do whatever they set their minds to.”

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When you see a sophomore girl selling towels in Red Square next month to raise money for a charity, know this: she could have been in movies.

But lifelong surfer Emi Koch (COL ’12) turned down that opportunity years ago to start an international non-profit to support opportunities for impoverished children instead. Now, she’s head of Beyond the Surface, International, a group that raises money to support centers where underprivileged children in Peru, South Africa, and India can learn to surf—a positive activity, Koch said, for children in poor communities where there usually aren’t alternatives.

“In Western society, we’re so used to having a Boy Scout group a Girl Scout group, or a volleyball club,” she said, “but there they don’t really have anything like that, so this gives them more self-empowerment and more self-confidence.”

In Peru, the center Beyond the Surface sponsors works with providing children with an activity after school. The second center is located in South Africa, where Koch said it serves as more of a rehabilitation clinic. Sniffing glue has become a popular drug addiction among the children in the community where the center is located, she said, and the surfing serves as a tool for rehabilitation. The third center, located in India, is dedicated to keeping kids out of violent street gangs. The center tries to get children off the streets by replacing their gang with a home in the life of surfing.

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Georgetown for Haiti, last Friday’s fundraising event for Doctors Without Borders, sounds like a big success. The event, which was co-sponsored by dozens of local businesses and catered by Georgetown favorites like SweetGreen and Rugby, was well-attended—particularly by Georgetown students—and has probably raised between $12,000 and $15,000, according to event organizer Richard Bahar.

It was a very Georgetown University crowd, too. Of the thousand-or-so locals that attended GFH, held in Lululemon, Bahar said that “easily half of them were undergraduates from Georgetown.” Georgetown student Anique Drumright (COL ’10), a Lululemon employee who helped work the door, said that some students were from GWU, but added that Georgetown DJ duo MecTec provided the music.

And as far as events go, it got pretty solid reviews. Georgetown Dish editor and local resident Beth Solomon thought it was a “really nice mix of young people and an established Georgetown crowd.” Drumright said, “I would just say that the fact that students came, it was amazing gesture that just shows how much they find the situation [in Haiti] important.”

And Bahar was pleased with both the crowd and the take. “One hundred percent of the profits will go to Doctors Without Borders … We got both students and some of the more well-known, high maintenance donors and sponsors,” like Anthony Lanier, who “owns half of M Street,” and Oprah Winfrey’s stylist. “Those are the ones where I had to work the room take them scotch,” he said.

Sounds like a success, right?

Almost—you can’t please everyone, and in this neighborhood, you can always count on one grouch-asaurus to complain about student presence on the georgetownforum listserv:

I attended this event and was VERY disappointed. This was NOT a community gathering in support of Haiti – it was basically a Georgetown frat party with a $10 cover charge and unfetered [sic] access to free booze.
This event should NOT have been called Georgetown for Haiti since it lacked any of the class and style of a Georgetown fundraiser – right down to the DJ – and should have been held directly on the GU campus instead. As my husband said when I called and told him I was leaving, “leave it up to Georgetown students to ruin an event”, though the slightest bit of restriction on the part of the event organizer would have eliminated that.

When I asked her about the criticism, Drumright was surprised. “Do we dance? Do we laugh? Yeah. But I think it was a great community event,” she said. You can read the full screed after the jump, or you can save yourself the headache. You already know what it says.

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Founded in 2009, Jacques-Philippe Piverger’s (MSB ’99) non-profit organization, Global Syndicate, is still in its infancy. But immediately after he heard about the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, his organization launched The Haiti Project, an ambitious fundraising campaign that will host fundraising events in six major U.S. cities.

But unlike a lot of recent fundraisers, The Haiti Project is not just focused on providing immediate relief effort for Haiti—while it is already raising funds, the first event, which will take place in New York City, is not until May 13. The campaign’s focus is on sustaining long-term development in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation as well as disaster relief.

“The focus [of Global Syndicate] is on economic development, health services, and access to education,” Piverger told the Voice. “We are raising funds for Haiti in those key areas. So far, we have raised a little over $20,000.”

Piverger said the fundraiser in New York City is shaping up well, with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and many New York political figures promising to attend. They have already identified several partners the event will benefit, too—part of the money raised there will go to the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund.

Another Georgetown alumni, Kristin Johnson, sits on the board of Global Syndicate, and several alumni and Georgetown-affiliated people are helping plan the various Haiti Project events, including Marcia Dyson, an affiliate of the Center for Social Justice and the wife of Professor Michael Eric Dyson.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington provoked quite a stir this week when it announced that it would abandon its contracts with the city unless the D.C. Council changed its proposed same-sex marriage bill.  The church says that the bill could force it to extend employee benefits to same-sex married couples, so they would no longer be able to provide the charitable services they currently offer.

Patrick Deneen (left), an associate professor of Government at Georgetown and director of the Tocqueville Forum, hosted a chat on the Washington Post’s website yesterday to explain and defend the Archdiocese’s decision.

Deneen spent a large part of the chat trying to re-frame the issue as the church being forced into giving up business relations with the city:

I think the basic premise of the Post’s story requires clarification. The premise of today’s story was that the Catholic Church was threatening to cease to provide charitable services if the law legalizing gay marriage is passed. In point of fact, it is the DC government that would cease to license or contract with the Church unless the Church conformed to a definition of marriage that violates its faith tradition.

Without a set of broader legal exemptions allowing for the Church to remain faithful to its definition of marriage, it will cease to be permitted by the City to provide the contracted and licensed services that it has for well over a century. The Church’s fundamental desire in this controversy is to continue its desire and freedom to serve.

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