The Dream Project: Who We Are

Hello everyone and welcome to our official Dream Project blog! We hope to inform and update the students and community members who support us on all of our events and things we have going on. We want to share our experience and all of our magical moments with you!

Now you might be wondering what exactly we as a club do and how we got our start. We are a new club on campus. The Dream Project was established fall of 2016. Our president, Holly Campbell, took to Facebook to see if anyone was interested in helping make her dream a reality. With an overwhelming amount of responses, a leadership team was established and the club took off! We asked Holly where her idea for the club came from.

"When I was a senior in high school I started to work as a princess for birthday parties. My teacher showed me a video of people visiting children in a hospital dressed up as princesses and it touched my heart. I was so moved but I didn't really think about it much. During the first Thanksgiving break God kept bringing this idea up in many different ways and I decided to write a message to our Freshmen Facebook group asking if anyone would be interested in starting a club like this at APU. The results were astounding. Since then I have worked with an amazing team to build up this group of people and serve our community for the glory of God."

With Holly's vision and a team behind her, the Dream Project was established. We had the leadership team, but we needed the characters. There is a process to getting our characters. It first starts off with an audition. From there we cast each person as a different role. Then we go through what we call our "characters in training" stage. This is where each student is asked to really study his or her character through different exercises or workshops we go through at our weekly meetings. We spent a good portion of our semester fundraising for our character costumes as well. We had many bake sales, GoFund Me pages, and a super fun Open Mic Night in the spring. By the end of the year our costumes were fundraised and we got all of our orders through. It was such a blessing from God to gather all of the funds we needed. We spent the summer anxiously awaiting the arrival of our costumes, and when we received them this fall they were definitely worth the wait. Our costumer went above and beyond! We are so excited to go out and put them to use!

This year we've had almost 50 new people join our club. Some of those students will be new characters, and some are what we like to call "dream chasers". These are students who do not dress up, but still attend events and go to weekly meetings. They do a lot of the behind the scenes things that characters need help with when out at an event and they help with our fundraisers. Our club could NOT function without them! We were overwhelmed at how many people wanted to be a part of our club family and we can't wait to watch it expand even more over the years.

We recently went to our first two community events. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about how it went!