On Nov. 25, the annual head-shaving challenge will take place on the Santiago Canyon College campus to raise money for St. Baldrick’s Foundation Bone Marrow Donor drive. Since it began 15 years ago, the event has been organized by communications students and has taught them how to produce a large, successful charity fundraiser.
Jared Kubicka-Miller, professor and speech and debate coach in the Department of Communication, started the charity event the semester after his 27-year-old brother, Scott Buehler, died while rescuing a cat from a tall cypress tree in 2008. Always a giving person, according to his friends and family, Scott had shaved his head to help raise money for childhood cancer research through St. Baldrick’s Foundation. To honor his brother, Kubicka-Miller created the event on the SCC campus to raise money but also to teach students in his Group Dynamics class how to organize a charity event.
Students in his class have been producing it ever since and have raised more than $70,000 for the charity.
“In the class we teach how to manage group communication, writing agendas, leadership, conflict resolution and decision-making,” he said. “It’s really all about event planning and making sure all of the administrative work is met, because St. Baldrick’s has certain legal requirements, our campus has certain legal requirements — there are a bunch of moving parts in organizing it.”
Classes that teach group dynamics often work on large projects, but the charity element makes this class unique, said Tara Kubicka-Miller, Jared’s wife, who is also a professor of communication at Santiago Canyon College, as well as chair of the Department of Communication and president of the academic senate. “This is a very skill-based, semester-long project.”
The class typically has between 60 and 100 students, and as they begin to plan the event, they break into seven task forces. “We have a task force that is the event planning. We also have a task force that focuses on social media. They learn how to get special access to our accounts and how to monitor the statistics and how to make content,” Jared Kubicka-Miller explained. “We have an administrative task force, so people who are business oriented tend to gravitate toward that one.”
The event took a different turn in 2014 when Tara Kubicka-Miller received frightening health news. “I was diagnosed with leukemia and ultimately diagnosed with a disease called MDS – myelodysplastic syndrome,” she said, “and was given two to four years to live unless I received a bone marrow transplant.”
A donor had to found who was a perfect DNA match for her marrow. “At the time, there was a group called Be the Match — they changed their name to National Bone Marrow Donor,” she said. Anyone can be part of a bone marrow registry by simply donating a swab of saliva taken from the inside of the mouth for a DNA sample. Should a match be needed, that donor will receive a call and arrangements will be made to donate their stem cells; their blood is then rushed to wherever the patient is located.
A young man in Germany turned out to be a perfect DNA match for Tara, and she is healthy and cancer-free today as the result of having the transplant at City of Hope, using his stem cells.
This experience inspired Jared Kubicka-Miller to want to raise money for the National Bone Marrow project, and he incorporated that into the annual St. Baldrick’s event. As a result, hundreds of people have signed up for the bone marrow registry.
Seeing their hard work result in a meaningful outcome teaches students valuable lessons.
“I love the transition from the first day to the last day because when I hit them with what is going to happen in the course, I know many doubt the success of the event,” Jared Kubicka-Miller said. “And then as we go through the process, we get closer, and it just keeps building and the momentum keeps on going, and we face challenges and we get through them. And they see how a dedicated group of people can be successful. I always look forward to that.”
Tara Kubicka-Miller sees a valuable life lesson for the students. “It is the perfect example of how your career as an educator is to take this expertise that you have and not just teach people content, but hopefully influence how they’re going to live life. This particular course takes our personal story of a lot of loss, a lot of fear and a lot of trauma and uses that as motivation to turn them into other things. I’m hoping when students are presented with really powerful life events, that the experience of what they’ve learned through Jared and me gets them to keep putting one foot in front of the other and know they can overcome them and do good things.”
St. Baldrick’s Event
10 a.m. –2 p.m. Nov. 25
Santiago Canyon College
8045 E. Chapman Avenue, Orange, CA
For more information or to make a donation, visit the website: www.stbaldricks.org/events/mypage/2308/2024
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