Is THON more than just a philanthropic project?

Back in 1973 at its inception, THON participants raised a mere $2000 for pediatric cancer. Today, THON has helped to raise almost $80 million for the Four Diamonds Fund, a foundation working to battle childhood cancer. THON is something Penn State students pride themself about and are obsessed with, which is not a problem at all. That is amazing. The fact that college students can come together for such a selfless act is incredible, and has resulted in the culmination of the largest student run philanthropy in the world.

Every student at Penn State knows about, or has heard of, canning, trips held on four weekends of the year. The campus more or less empties out on canning weekend and not much goes on around here. Students pack themselves into cars and travel all around the tri-state area, and sometimes even farther, to stand on the side of the road and collect donations. 

Recently, a handful of tragedies have occurred over the past few canning weekend. On the most recent weekend, a carful of students were in a car crash but luckily no one was injured. Unfortunately, the canning weekend before the last one saw a truly hapless tragedy. A group of students were on their way up to someones house to go canning and they were in a car crash; a freshman student was killed. This seems like it was a freak accident. There was no alcohol involved and all of the passengers were wearing seat belts. THON now requires students who go canning to attend an informational session on how to can safely; you must also wear a wristband given out prior to each canning weekend. In my opinion, these measurements are not very useful and do not accomplish much. Here’s why:

Canning has become somewhat of a competition for students. Student groups try to meet a certain amounts to be able to say they are heavily involved with THON and can receive dancers to actually dance in the marathon, because there are only a certain amount of space on the dance floor. Many student groups have established “quotas” that members must achieve. This is not where I see a problem though; quotas kind of take away the idea of voluntary service but they also encourage students to participate. Canning on the street is dangerous. Students are going to be aggressive when canning no matter what; unless you are on street level there is really no way to get money from cars. It is impractical for people to pull over and donate a dollar or two. That said, it is safer to stand on the side of the street and wait for red lights to get closer to cars, but this is still very dangerous. You never know when someone could lift their foot off the break accidentally or drift a bit off of the lane. I cannot say I am sure of how much money is generated from canning, but I think some new ways of individual fundraising should be proposed, maybe instead of canning offer free car washes with “donations for FTK,” (wouldn’t exactly be free like canning but you would get more generous donations) or just other safer methods.