'HPU cares' raises thousands for Hurricane Sandy Relief: Junior Bonnie Vallee didn't know about the four feet of water that was creeping into her new Jersey home on Oct. 29, but she could already feel a wave of emotions washing over her from hundreds of miles away.

• Position: Caring PEOPLE - High Point University

While safe on the HPU campus, Vallee felt helpless as her friends and family were in the midst of Hurricane Sandy. Her mother was stuck at work in the middle of the storm which, at the least, gave her access to generators and a phone. Her stepfather, however, had gone back to the family's house in Brick Township, N.J. and stopped answering his phone not long after the storm hit. Many of her friends went silent on social media, and hundreds of HPU students from the Northeast all sat waiting to hear from their families.

The outcome was bittersweet: Vallee's family was OK, but their house was left with major flood damage. Her parents were left struggling to cope without a home and electricity.

"It was a rough couple weeks to say the least," says Vallee. "I used Facebook and other forms of social media to catch up on what was going on at home. A lot of the time I filled in my mom on what was going on in the rest of town because they didn't have the news, computers or anything like that."

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For other students like Lindsay Christel from Long Island, the news was better. Her home was intact but the surrounding neighborhoods were left in ruins.

"We'd get calls from our families who didn't have power for 14 days, so they had to live with other people and shower at other people's houses," says Christel, a junior.

As Vallee's parents moved in with relatives and began picking up the pieces, she and other students from the Northeast rallied to support those back home. Together, they created the HPU Cares fund for Hurricane Sandy Relief, and High Point University pledged to match every dollar that they raised.

Their efforts were numerous and included a "Pie the One Who Cares" event, a dodge ball tournament and a "dine out for the cause" event, and the Student Government Association made a $6,000 donation.

Vallee and fellow students designed a T-shirt that read "Revive, Rebuild, Recover" with the state of New Jersey printed on the back. They had hundreds of shirts printed within a week of the storm, and they sold...