Since 2013, the Athletes for Hope team has collaborated with student-athletes to educate, connect and recognize their efforts in communities all across the US. What started with a few teams from University of Virginia (UVA) has grown to more than ten university campuses and thousands of student-athletes collaborating to strengthen and support community partners. We’ve been educating student-athletes from UVA to LSU, Southern University, Tulane, Michigan State, Ohio State, USC, UCLA, Georgetown and Howard University as our newest AFH U campus. With this, we are excited to celebrate Student-Athlete Day on April 6, 2021 to honor and recognize the incredible student-athletes that we work with.
National Student-Athlete day was started in 1987 by the National Consortium for Academics and Sports. The day was created to celebrate high school and collegiate student-athletes annually on April 6. It promotes the positive virtues of sport, student-athletes as a whole, and the positive effect they both have on society.
Since its inception, over 4.4 million student-athletes have been honored with certificates. All student-athletes must have earned a 3.0+ GPA and be involved in outreach and community service.
For the rest of this week, we’ll be highlighting student-athlete driven activities on our social media channels, identifying ways to advocate on behalf of student-athletes and featuring AFH University (AFH U) student-athletes, community partners and highlights of their work from the past year. Even in a global pandemic year, we’ve had more than 39 AFH U Community Connections since July with more than 1,270 hours of service this year to date provided by this incredible group!
We have seen such tremendous resilience, patience and adversity from our student-athletes and communities this year and we are eager to help tell their stories. If you are a student-athlete, university or community partner and want to help us in this effort, please contact us and we’ll help elevate your great work. Join us all week as we celebrate and recognize the great work of so many incredible student-athletes!