Almost 130 pairs of jeans were sold at the event, which raised $1,200 for the Somali Women's Scholarship Fund.
The money is enough to pay for one woman's tuition and necessary expenses at a Somali university for one year. Link-Up member Micaela Klein '10 said she hoped Link Up would hold similar events every year to benefit the Scholarship Fund.
"We sent one woman to spend one year of university education in Somalia," she said. "We can continue doing this in future years. Every time we have events that raise money we can send it their way. That way Dartmouth is making a difference in another part of the world."
Link Up organized the space and advertising for the event, which drew about 500 students and lasted for five hours. Link Up was founded this year as a mentoring program between freshmen and senior women on campus and provides programming events sponsored by junior and sophomore members.
"I think I would have benefited a lot from any sort of mentor in my life my whole freshman year," Link Up co-founder and director Frances Vernon '10 said. "You do a lot of growing between freshman and sophomore year and every year of school."
Klein, who introduced Link Up to the Somali Women's Scholarship Fund, said she saw the sale as an opportunity for Link Up to expand its work into the global community.
"Link Up is all about connecting women with other women, and the fund is all about giving women who wouldn't have the opportunity without the funds to receive an education," Klein said. "This is a way for women to gain the tools to help rebuild their country."
Link Up member and planner of the event Cathy Lian '10 came up with the idea for the jean sale after shopping with friends who are students at a different college.
The friends did not want to buy jeans during their shopping excursion because they said a they could buy jeans at a denim sale at their university and some of the profits would go to charity. At Link Up's executive committee meeting this Winter term, Lian and Klein hatched the plan of hosting a charity denim sale that would benefit the Scholarship Fund.
Charity Denim, a non-profit organization that sells jeans at discount prices and donates the profits to charity, provided all the clothes and dressing rooms for the sale.
The organization offered Link Up $8-10 from each pair sold to donate to the charity of its choice. All the money will go to the Somali Women's Scholarship fund, which is run by the U.S. Committee of the United Nations Development Program.
"That's the point of our projects in the various countries -- increase government accountability and alleviate poverty at the same time," Rebekah McKnight, operations associate at UNDP-USA, the organization that hosts the fund, said. "Get women to be a bit more involved in the country, and hopefully that leads to increased stability in the country, and then Somalia will be a bit more active in the international arena."
