Greek Music Awards to raise money for charity

Zabrina Hvostal

Kappa Sigma’s 5th Annual Greek Music Awards will be held this Friday at 7 p.m. in the Student Center Ballroom.

The GMAs are Kappa Sigma’s big philanthropy for the spring semester to raise money for the Fisher House Foundation and Military Heroes, their national philanthropy. 

Jonah Hartswick, philanthropy chairman, said that last year his fraternity raised $13,000 and this year they are hoping to beat that. “We try to one-up ourselves each year,” Hartswick said. “Last year we nearly doubled our record from the year before.”

The GMAs consists of four categories: rock, hip-hop, pop and country. Sororities and fraternities that are participating are assigned a genre and create a music video with a song of their choice. 

The GMAs will be set up like a red carpet event, similar to the Video Music Awards hosted on MTV. Each video made will be shown that night. Winners are picked by a group of Kappa Sigma judges based off of the music video created and the amount of fundraising they did. 

“We have about 500 people attending the event right now,” Hartswick said. “We had to up the amount of seating this year since so many people signed up. We are really excited about the turnout.”

Fundraising for the event came from ticket sales, registration fees for participants, donations from local business and bracelets that the brothers were selling in the student center all week.

This year all donations will be given directly to the Louis Stokes VA Hospital in Greater Cleveland to support the construction of a brand new Fisher House.

Contact Zabrina Hvostal at [email protected].