Every year, the school district, supports the American Cancer Society’s, Relay for Life. This awareness-raising event is a walk for cancer held in different towns and communities and used to raise money for cancer research. Students form teams about three months before the event to see who is able raise the most money. This year is my first year participating in Relay and as the team captain, it is much more rewarding than I expected. It helps expand your thought process by forcing you and your teams to come up with different fundraising ideas that can help you raise money. For example, my team just placed an order for the delicious Japanese candy Hi- Chew, and we sold in school to meet our goal for fundraising. Other teams host things such as car washed and bake sales to raise money. The night of relay is a time at which all the teams from the schools camp out on the track field and walk around it all night “because cancer never sleeps”. The event lasts from 6 pm to 6 am. While our team takes shifts between walking and sleeping, the night is filled with fun games and live music that the kids can enjoy while walking. A month before the event, we had only raised $360, but there was still plenty of time to reach our goal of $1000. Over the next month, my team asked their families and friends for donations and we ended up raising $2,000. This was double our goal, which caused great excitement among my team. The night of Relay was not only helpful, but fun as well. Along with the fun you I had with team and friends, it felt good to know that I was doing this for such an amazing cause. Relay for Life has been so inspirational to me in that it has shown me that I have the ability to make a difference. It was definitely one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. Even if my teams’ $2000 doesn’t cure cancer, we will know it is going towards the cause and will end up helping find a cure someday.