This spring, the Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND) chapter at Amherst Regional High School (ARHS) in Amherst, Mass. was looking for a fundraiser that would pack a punch. The STAND club sold T-shirts and held bake sales, but none of these events seemed to hold the students' interest.

This year, AHRS's computer graphics and visual technology teacher Lee Larcheveque introduced to the students a tabletop game called “Pitchnut.” Larcheveque's grandfather is rumored to have invented the game and little else in known about Pitchnut's origins. It has become widely popular at AHRS and many students gather after school to compete against each other.

Pitchnut is played on a wooden board with a pocket in each corner. There are two sets of colored discs and each player takes turns flicking the “shooter” at their colored discs. As in pool, the objective is to get all of your discs into the pockets without hitting the oddly colored “poison” disc until all of your discs are in the pockets. Larcheveque makes all of the boards by hand, based on his grandfather's design.

A Pitchnut tournament seemed like a great idea for a fundraiser—it was apparent that playing Pitchnut in order to raise money for the people of Darfur could collectively appeal to many students.

I was part of the small Pitchnut tournament committee that was established to organize the event. We asked all those competing to collect pledges. For example, someone may have pledged a competitor one dollar for every game won. If the competitor won ten games, the person who pledged would pay them ten dollars. As an incentive, a Pitchnut board would be given to the student who raised the most money.

We decided to call the event PitchnutapaLOOZA. We set up all of the boards belonging to Mr. Larcheveque as well as to ARHS's other faithful Pitchnut players.

There were at least fifteen boards set up on a Wednesday night in May as students began walking into PitchnutapaLOOZA. STAND members brought food and charged $5 for a plate, which allowed the players to come back between games for second and third helpings. STAND also invited ARHS's Jazz Band to perform during the two-hour long event. By the end of the evening we had raised $1600, which exceeded all of our expectations.

Although there are many wonderful organizations currently working toward improving the situation in Darfur, our STAND chapter decided to donate the money raised during PitchnutapaLOOZA to the Darfur Peace and Development Organization's Solar Cooker Project, which provides women in refugee camps with an innovative alternate to leaving the camp in search of firewood. Very often, as the women leave the Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps to collect firewood, members of the Janjaweed—the Sudanese government-backed militia—harass and rape these women. As wood is becoming increasingly scarce and the deforestation of Darfur advances, women are forced to wander farther and farther away from their camps. The simple cooker alleviates a few of the many problems plaguing the refugees.

Providing assistance to those in need has always been important to me. The idea of tzedakah and caring for others in a just and righteous manner has been something my father has impressed upon me throughout my life. Through his work with various global philanthropic organizations, he has stressed that tzedakah is not only something one should do, but something one is commanded to do. This is what first inspired me to take the initiative that eventually allowed us to provide women in Darfur with solar cookers.

The support for Darfur that the Pitchnut game generated was fantastic. Though much more needs to be accomplished, Pitchnut has become more than just a game; it has become a way to change people's lives.