Aug 8, 2018 By Angela Roberts staff Writer aroberts@observer-Reporter.Com 5 min read

A few months after the Peters Township Middle School hosted Relay for Life in 2017, Ashley Meisel and Chad Spencer texted back and forth, bouncing ideas off of each other on how to rejuvenate the community’s fundraiser for the American Cancer Society. That year, attendance at the 12 hour event had been sparse – with hours going by without anyone walking on the school’s track – and only five teams had participated.

But when Meisel shot an email to the community development manager at ACS to share the results of their brainstorming, she received a disappointing reply: Due to the low turnout in recent years, Peters Township would not host its own Relay for Life in 2018. Instead, teams from Peters could participate in Chartiers-Houston’s Relay.

Hearing this news “kind of sucked,” said Meisel, who graduated from Peters Township High School with Spencer in 2017. Both are now rising sophomores at Penn State University

“We were really excited,” she added.

That’s when Spencer pitched one of the crazy ideas for which Meisel said he is famous: What if the two of them brought Relay for Life back to Peters Township in 2019 as a 24-hour fundraiser?

Fast forward to a little over a year later. About 15 high school and college students crowded into the living room of a Peters Township home in July, smushed together on a sofa and perched on stools. Over their chatter, Spencer raised his voice to proudly declare that not only did the team have permission to use the high school’s track and field for the event, they now had an official webpage on Relay for Life’s website.

“It’s been kind of crazy,” Meisel said. “I can’t believe it’s actually working.”

Relay for Life will return to Peters Township High School Stadium on June 15 and run straight into June 16. Meisel and Spencer have teamed up with Meghan Joos, the community service coordinator for Canon-McMillan High School’s student council, to make the event a joint effort between the two school districts. The team hopes the fundraiser will collect at least $25,000 for the American Cancer Society.

In the early stages of planning, Spencer and Meisel wondered if their ideas would be taken seriously.

“I know we’re technically considered adults, but there were no adult adults involved,” Meisel explained.

But when they met with ACS Community Development Manager Nancy Verderber in September, she gave them the green light after making sure they understood the guidelines their event needed to follow.

Now, the duo leads a team of about 25 young adults who are divided among eight different planning committees. Although members range from middle school to university, many have something in common: When asked how they became involved in Relay for Life, most of the crowd at the July meeting pointed, laughing, at Spencer.

“Everyone knows Chad,” said Jacelyn Palmer, a rising sophomore at Penn State University’s Behrend campus who leads the team’s administrative committee.

Spencer became involved in Relay for Life in 2017, when he joined the young adult-run team Meisel had started her sophomore year of high school. After his father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2016, he noticed that his teachers and friends seemed hesitant to breach the subject with him. Spencer himself wasn’t sure how to bring up his dad’s diagnosis, even though he said it would have been nice to talk about it.

But he found that discussing cancer wasn’t taboo at Relay for Life. Rather, the fundraiser strives to celebrate the lives of those impacted by the disease.

“I really want the community to be on a level where everyone’s able to be like, ‘you know, even if I haven’t dealt with something like this, I can talk to you,'” Spencer said. “‘And it doesn’t have to be something I’m scared to bring up because I don’t know anything about it.'”

Spencer’s father died in August. When he entered his freshman year at Penn State, he wasted no time in becoming involved in the school’s Relay for Life team. Spencer also participated in the joint Peters Township-Chartiers Houston Relay event in May with Meisel, Palmer and a fourth friend from high school.

While Spencer and Meisel are now working to recruit older members of the community to join their team, they want it to remain a youth-led effort. Spencer said that he accepts that this means the event may not be run as efficiently as it would be if adults were in charge.

“But with kids, once you get them involved in something, they become very active and they’re willing to stay up for the 24 hours straight and they’re willing to talk to all of their friends about it,” he said.

Indeed, July’s meeting occasionally strayed off topic, at one point devolving into a brief yet fiery debate over whether a hot dog should be considered a sandwich. But members also pitched fundraising ideas and decided on a theme for the event: music through the ages.

“We’ve got this random group of high school and college students together and we’ve all been working so hard,” Meisel said. “If we pull this off this year, think about how much better we could make it next year.”

For more information about the event or to donate, visit Relay for Life online at relayforlife.org, and search by “Event Name” for “Peters Township.” Or, search by zip code to read about other Relay for Life events near you.