The Paupers are currently gearing up for a full season, despite finding themselves in debt to the Student Activities Fund Office over the summer. The group sought funds from alumni Paupers and the University community through fundraising and the crowdsourcing site GoFundMe and ultimately overcame the deficit. They’ve raised $670 of the desired $2,000 on GoFundMe and are still accepting donations. So far, they’ve raised enough to continue a full season.
Treasurer Wesley Darling, a junior, said the debt started the student organization’s semester off on a daunting note, but that it ultimately united the group under a common goal.
“It was very scary to have our first task be to get out of debt, and the scariest thing was that if we had that debt, we wouldn’t be able to get funding from student government for our show this fall,” Darling said. “That’d be really bad because putting on great shows is our main goal, and that fear brought us all together and pulled us up by our bootstraps.”
Now that the debt has been eliminated, the group is focused on putting on another stellar season. The Players are currently in the process of producing “A Chorus Line” to kick off the fall season in November.
Senior Mariah Barksdale, executive director of publicity, said the group has put the summer behind them.
“We’re not really concerned at all with finances anymore because we bounced back and have a great show in our arsenal,” she said. “We’re all pretty positive people, and we knew that nothing was going to keep us down, so we moved past it and have been focusing on the next season and expanding our group and its community involvement.”
According to sophomore producer Mckenzie Wilson, “A Chorus Line” is the group’s opportunity to make a statement about the future of Pauper Players.
“With getting past this debt, I think we were kind of proving a point to each other,” Wilson said. “We wanted to prove not only that we could do this, but that we could make sure it never happens again.”
