The final number is $15,931

The Uplift Project is closed, and the final number is $15,931. That's what our campaign raised for families facing blood cancer through Blood Cancer United's Student Visionaries of the Year program. I've read that number enough times that it should feel normal by now. It doesn't.

I want to be clear about who did this. I led a team of students from Lutheran High School of San Antonio, and they carried more of this campaign than a recap post can show. We ran fundraisers and put on community events. We did outreach all over the city, which in practice means asking people for money and following up until maybe turns into an answer. None of it was complicated.

The strangest morning of the whole thing was KSAT12. We went live on Good Morning San Antonio, and there was a live phone bank too. Nobody teaches you how to be on television in high school. You rehearse what you're going to say, the segment starts, and somehow it's already over. Then you spend the rest of the day wondering what your face was doing.

The day I'd point to, if you asked why any of this matters, was the Best Day Ever celebration we organized for my friend Miguel as he recovered from leukemia. I won't narrate the whole thing here, because it was his day, not campaign content. I'll just say that watching a friend get celebrated like that changes what you think a fundraiser is for. The money goes to families living through exactly that.

Our number also sits inside a bigger one. Student teams across South Texas raised $1.1 million through this program this year. I like our $15,931 better as a piece of that total than as a headline on its own. It means a lot of other students spent the year doing the same slow, unglamorous work we did.

The campaign is closed, but the site is still up at theupliftproject.us if you want to see what we built. And if you're a student thinking about signing up, do it. Asking people for money never stops being awkward. You just get quicker at it.