This year, a Mehlville dance studio — the Emily Jane Dance Center — was named the studio that raised the second highest amount of money in the country for the nonprofit Dancers Against Cancer (DAC). The dancers and their families secured a flurry of donations, collecting more than $18,000 over the summer.
Dancers Against Cancer offers financial aid to dancers who are battling cancer. Due to her role in the fundraising campaign, the founder of Emily Jane Dance Center, Emily Streigel, will travel to Los Angeles on Oct. 21 for DAC’s Industry Dance Awards and Gala of the Stars.
“I was really excited that we got the opportunity to do this for kids, and hopefully bring that financial burden off the families — to see some kind of joy during their treatment struggles and be able to continue to dance,” Streigel said.
The fundraising campaign began when Streigel received a call that, at the national dance competition in Panama City Beach, Florida, parents could perform their own dance routine. In order for parents to perform, the studio that their children attended would need to raise money for DAC.
“The limit to how much we could raise was just however much we could. There was no set goal,” Streigel said. “I knew 100% for a fact that the dads’ dance we’d been preparing would be perfect for this. I knew they’d be like, ‘Yeah, we want to do it!’”
Over the course of the next month, Streigel says her dancers and their families were tireless in collecting donations for the cause.
“Everyone was rallying,” Streigel said. “The parents were going to their workplaces and asking for donations. The kids were going door-to-door. It was everybody. It was really cool to see everybody come together.”
By the time of the national competition in June, the Emily Jane Dance Center had raised $15,000 for Dancers Against Cancer. Fourteen fathers got on stage to do their dads’ dance, and donations kept rolling in throughout the competition. By the end of the competition, the studio had raised another $2,000, and they were honored for raising the most money of any studio that attended nationals.
“(The students) were ecstatic,” Streigel said. “They were jumping up and down, screaming. Their dads actually ended up getting a little trophy and called on-stage. It was a cute moment with their daughters seeing that, seeing it’s because of this cause — you did this for this cause and for an important reason.”
The Emily Jane Dance Center kept their donations open into August. By the time Streigel closed the donation window, her dancers and their families had helped raise a grand total of approximately $18,000. Streigel later got a call that this was the second largest sum of any studio in the entire country.
“Seeing everything happen that fast — I just really didn’t expect it,” Streigel said. “The families came together. Some of them were calling their friends five or six times a day, begging people for money. But it’s for such a good cause. They never quit. They kept pushing. I can’t believe how much we were able to do.”
