Did you fall in love with IC at first sight? If you did, here’s your chance to help incoming first-year students do the same!
More Love Letters is a national organization dedicated to spreading happiness and love in pure, old-fashioned, written form. IC More Love Letters (ICMLL) is a chapter of their Campus Cursive project, which aims to spread love on college campuses. ICMLL spreads love in two different ways: anonymous notes and love letter bundles.
Anonymous notes are written by members at biweekly meetings and then placed all around campus for students to find. Students also have the opportunity tosubmit a nomination for someone they know who needs a little bit of love (without any personal or identifying information), and members of the student organization will all write letters to that person and put them together in a love letter bundle.
Secretary Madison Schaffer ’18 said her favorite part of being a member of ICMLL is “hiding the letters because after you write these cute notes, make sure they look adorable, and you put them somewhere, you can just picture in your head someone finding them. I love making someone’s day, and even if I’m not there to see it, it’s definitely worthwhile.”
ICMLL is currently sponsoring its second annual IC Love At First Sight campaign. The ultimate goal of this campaign is to write one letter for each individual first-year student who will be arriving on campus in the fall semester. These letters will be placed in first-year students’ residence hall rooms so that they are the first thing these students see when moving in.
The idea for the IC Love at First Sight campaign came from a residential life staff member last year. ICMLL launched the campaign in April 2014, and they successfully collected 800 letters before move-in day in August. With the grand total of 800 letters, every first-year student living in a single room received one, and the remaining letters were turned into bulletin boards for Resident Assistants to put up in first-year residential buildings. President Sabrina Knight ‘16 said, “we’re hoping to get across to first-year students that we thought about them before they came to campus so they can join us and expand the campaign to give back to more students in the future.”
This year, ICMLL is hoping to match the 800 letters that were written last year and go beyond. If you are interested in contributing some letters, ICMLL definitely wants your help! Knight explained, “letters can be anything including a full letter on 8.5x11 paper, an inspirational quote, a drawing, or anything really. We’re not just focused on formal letter format. We’re really open to how students want to put their own personality into their letters.” There are a few guidelines for letter-writing, and they can all be found on their Facebook page.
If you feel comfortable, you can write letters using your own materials and ideas, or you can send an email to icmoreloveletters@gmail.com for some of their materials and letter prompts. If you are part of a student organization or another group interested in writing letters, ICMLL can send a representative to help facilitate a group meeting where attendees can write letters. The deadline for all letters is the beginning of August. If you are interested in writing letters over the summer, you can mail them to the Office of Residential Life at this address:
Joelle Albertsman
2001 East Tower
953 Danby Road
Ithaca, NY 14850
Please consider contributing some letters to this amazing campaign. Like Schaffer says, “everybody could use some love!”
To learn more about student organizations successes please read the last edition of Club Hub.
