Students gather to say thanks

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Tags: flood recovery, philanthropy, volunteers, winter-2011

UQ students (from left) Neil Harbison, Qinfan (Crystal) Zhang, Tracey Chieng, Zhen (Pearl) Xu and Corina Preda give personal thanks to flood appeal donors

Most people can’t remember the last time they handwrote a thank you letter – but for 41 UQ students the experience has been a gratifying one.

More than $330,000 was donated to the Vice-Chancellor’s Emergency Student Welfare Fund to help flood-affected UQ students and staff. To say thank you, the University sought student volunteers to handwrite personal notes to every donor.

The “Thank-a-Thon” attracted 41 earnest and grateful volunteers who wanted to personally thank donors for their generosity.

Among the participants was Crystal Zhang, who received a grant from the fund to replace some of her personal belongings destroyed when her St Lucia flat was flooded.

“The grant helped me replace some of my damaged belongings and buy books for Semester One. I wanted to say thanks in a practical and meaningful way,” she said.

In total, the student volunteers worked almost 100 hours across three weeks to handwrite almost 1000 thank you cards – a tremendous show of gratitude for the compassion and generosity of UQ’s alumni and friends.

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