We began March according to our tradition: with a lighthearted but highly competitive “March Challenge” to see which alumni class could achieve the highest donor participation with gifts to the NCSSM Foundation. Likewise, our students were focused on things familiar to us all: grinding out assignments during the last days of winter and looking forward to spring and rites of passage, including college acceptances, prom and commencement. Of course, everything has been upended by a new and unexpected challenge - a novel coronavirus.

The rapid changes required around the world and at NCSSM to fight the spread of COVID-19 have shifted our mindset from fun competition to serious collaboration. It’s made our March fundraising initiative more important than ever.

So many of the needs for NCSSM residential and online programs that were going to be supported by the Foundation in the coming year remain necessary, and now there are new needs related to this emergency, as well. As NCSSM residential classes move to remote instruction using technology, Foundation support is needed to provide devices and home internet access for students who don’t have them, to send care packages for students with special need, to continue stipends to low-income students from our Financial Need Fund, and to help with crises from the newly established Emergency and Resilience Fund. Annual Fund gifts, being unrestricted, have the most flexibility to be used for urgent needs as they arise -- including ones we have not even identified yet. We know that in such challenging times, we can still mobilize our community to give back.

Though we’ll continue to track alumni participation by class, we’ve shifted the focus of this March Challenge to a unified effort to address the challenges before our community. In this uncertain time, we can all connect through our worldwide Unicorn family and team up to care for today’s students and the school that gave so much to us. To do that, we’ve extended the timeframe to meet our goal to raise $100,000 to April 9 -- International Unicorn Day.