January 26, 2004

Winners Abound In Charitable Campaign

There's nothing like a little friendly rivalry to raise the bar.

In the unofficial competition between the Storrs campus and the UConn Health Center for the largest donation to the Connecticut State Employee Charitable Campaign (CSECC), both groups are claiming victory.

According to Maria Sedotti, chair of the CSECC in Storrs, Storrs (when including the regional campuses) wins. "After all," she says, "the regional campuses are referred to as 'Storrs-based' programs."

More than 560 people at the Storrs campus donated $117,051. The regional campuses donated another $22,005, bringing the Storrs-based programs' total to $139,056.

The Health Center's campaign, chaired by Joyce Borkowski, shattered every record in the books for the Farmington-based center, raising a total of $120,228. The amount represented a 75 percent increase in contributions compared to last year which, itself, set a record. There were 711 donors to this year's campaign, a 185 percent increase from last year.

The real winners, of course, are the people who need services from the nearly 1,000 agencies supported in part by the CSECC's annual campaign. The UConn groups contributed nearly $260,000 to the 2003 campaign, a large portion of the slightly more than $1.5 million collected from all state employees working at all state agencies.

"It really was a tremendous effort," says Jan Gwudz, state director of the CSECC. "UConn, as usual, set the standard."