About 175 University of Michigan students gathered at The Kensington Hotel in Ann Arbor Friday for Redemption Prom, an evening of ballroom dancing, singing and celebration featuring a vintage photo booth with props, a professional DJ and a bar.
Redemption Prom was the culmination of a semester-long project for ALA 223: Entrepreneurial Creativity. The course explores the intersection of innovation, problem solving and creativity through a focus on entrepreneurship group projects. Redemption Prom was organized with the goal of providing a make-up dance to the class of 2024, who missed their high school prom due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown.
LSA senior Ryan Caine, Engineering junior Vasundhara Kulkarni, LSA senior Joyce Zhu and LSA senior Rileigh Goldsmith were the students who worked on the prom project.
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Goldsmith said she decided to help organize the prom because she wanted to make up for the class of 2024’s lost experience.
“I was talking to my mom about graduation because I’m a senior and we have some other seniors on the team as well,” Goldsmith said. “Everyone never went to prom, and we can just throw a prom for the seniors to redo it, kind of let them redo or rewrite that memory that we all lost.”
ALA 223 Professor Eric Fretz said he loves teaching the course because he gets to watch his students’ ideas come alive.
“I love seeing these students get passionate about their ideas,” said Fretz. “The students are so brilliant, but no one has been able to put them in the field yet, so this is their chance to put something to life that is meaningful to them.”
All of the Redemption Prom ticket profits will be donated to Garrett’s Space, a nonprofit that addresses gaps in mental health treatment for young adults. The event also included a table booth with a raffle and donation opportunities for Garrett’s Space. Goldsmith said the organizers decided to donate the profits because of the link between COVID-19 and increased anxiety and depression.
“During 2020, so many of us just were so affected and our mental health really declined in lots of ways,” Goldsmith said. “So honestly, our biggest goal for this event is not only to raise money for Garrett’s Space, but also just to have a night of complete joy.”
In an interview with The Daily, Kulkarni said the event was sponsored by several local Ann Arbor businesses and spoke about the process of recruiting businesses for the event.
“We called about 300 businesses, we went to every business and we gave them a pamphlet,” Kulkarni said. “Target is one of our sponsors for the event, which is really cool, as well as Chipotle.”
Goldsmith said when planning the prom, the team wanted it to be an opportunity for the graduating class to come together and celebrate their achievements.
“You can kind of reclaim the old prom archetype or stereotypes per se that you wanted to have those memories of,” Goldsmith said. “It’s a way to come together as a graduating class and really just celebrate.”
In an interview with The Daily, Engineering senior Phoebe Wong said she decided to attend the prom with her friend because she felt she lost the high school experience and wanted to make up for it.
“I just saw an advertisement on Instagram, and I thought it was really interesting,” Wang said. “We’re both seniors and obviously we were class of 2020 with COVID and so we never got to experience prom.”
Daily News Reporter Kate Levy can be reached at kjlevy@umich.edu.