Carleton’s graduate student union will be raffling off prizes ranging from Mike’s Place gift certificates to an iPad to raise money for victims of the flood that devastated Pakistan this summer.

“We noticed that the response to the Haiti disaster last year [from the Carleton community] was huge. So we decided we should do something to show our support for
Pakistan as well,” said Kelly Black, the GSA’s vice-president (operations).

The goal of the Graduate Students’ Association (GSA) is to raise $1,500, with the Canadian government matching the donation for a $3,000 total.

The raffle runs until Sept. 24. Tickets can be bought at Mike’s Place or from the GSA Office on the sixth floor of the University Centre for $3 each. All money raised will be donated to the Pakistan Floods Emergency Appeal program with Islamic Relief Canada (IRC), an international relief and development charity.

Black acknowledged that the campus response to the Pakistan disaster has been slow. He said he believes this is because students were on summer vacation when the flood occurred. Black said he hopes that the raffle won’t just raise money, but awareness.

Sallah Hamdani, executive director of the IRC, urged students to support the raffle.

“People [across Canada] have held everything from galas to penny drives, and when you look at it from a large scale, all of this is having a massive effect to help these
people that are relatively helpless,” said Hamdani.

He says he thinks the GSA’s fundraising efforts will be effective.

“Twenty-million people are being affected [by this flood],” he said. “One Canadian dollar has the ability to save lives.

Hamdani said that even if students don’t win the raffle, their money won’t go to waste.

However, not all have boarded the GSA’s fundraising boat. Dustin Hutton-Alcorn, a third-year political science and human rights, student said the GSA’s efforts should be put elsewhere.

“The GSA's immediate responsibility should be to the needs of the campus community. There are Carleton students here that live below the poverty line.”
Hutton-Alcorn said many of the campaigns that are being run at Carleton are on a national or international level, instead of local.

“I think it’s good that the GSA is trying to make students more aware of what happened [in Pakistan], but I also think its more important for us to deal with our own
problems here first,” he said.

Tara Fisher, a first-year social work master’s student, said she disagrees with Hutton-Alcorn’s view on the raffle.

“Our world is a global society. Its our responsibility as privileged Canadians to support others in the world.”