Lifted, an organization run by anonymous Cornell students, will place balloons attached with thank you notes on the Arts Quad for the third year running to lift the spirits of the community.
Cornellians submitted thank you notes to any member of the community they wanted to acknowledge through Lifted’s website. These notes will then be transcribed onto cards and attached to balloons which will visible on the Arts Quad for one day.
Letter submission is closed at the time of this article’s publication as the organization had already received 480 letters, which is the maximum numbers of balloons they could put up.
Lifted declined to reveal the exact date, but said that they will secretly set up the balloons when “the weather is nice and stress on campus is high.”
The secretive group, which decided to collect letters using an online form rather than in paper to improve outreach, received the largest number of thank you notes this year. Notes were usually written on paper in the past years, according to the organization’s representative who communicated with The Sun via the organization’s Facebook page.
Recipients of the thank you notes will also receive an email on the day of the event with the exact location of their card. In case they cannot make it to the Arts Quad on that day, they’ll also be sent the message via email after the event is over.
“We believe that it’s easy, at Cornell, to get wrapped up in our own lives, to be so stressed out and always going, going, going that we don’t have time to look around and see … all of the people that have helped us,” a Lifted member said. Through this decorative event, “Lifted … hopes to get students to slow down and reflect about the people in their lives” and “to lift everyone who sees it.”
The organization wants to stay anonymous and keep their members’ identities secret because they “believe that Lifted shouldn’t be accredited to one person or one group/groups of people.”
“Nobody and no groups have put their name on this project because it shouldn’t be done for recognition but just to uplift the Cornell community,” the organization said.
While letter submissions are closed, Lifted said they will place a “red mailbox on the edge of the quad” for people to put in their own thank you notes, recognizing that many more people may still want to express their appreciation. These notes will be sent out after the event, the member added.