For the past five years, the Rise Young Professionals (Rise YP) have hosted trivia night fundraisers in support of Rise Community Development and our mission to build a more equitable city.  This year with the reality of COVID-19, the event looked quite a bit different!  We held a virtual “Pajama Party” themed trivia night on Saturday, September 12th. A whopping 32 teams joined in on the fun!  Our virtual platform meant teams from all around the U.S. had the opportunity to attend. We had people joining us from Texas, California, and Washington DC!

Our Board Chair, Jami Cox, opened the evening with some background on the Rise YP board, then our “Trivia King,” John Williams, kicked off trivia with a couple of great one-liners from Trivia King!

We created questions for five rounds of trivia with topics including snacks, celebrity childhood photos, board games, city skylines, and surprise lightning round. During each round, the teams broke out into smaller virtual rooms to deliberate their answers and strategize their use of mulligans, of course! During the lightning round, each team answered fifty questions in only ten minutes! The judges had some mercy and let the players use Google on the lightning round.

During intermission, our prize wheel selected a winner for the Google Home raffle from over 350 raffle tickets that were purchased!

Behind the scenes, our Rise YP judges tallied responses to keep track of the team rankings. At the end of the night, the Duke Duke Goons and the Inmates (the Rise Community Development team) tied for 1st place. After a tiebreaker, the Duke Duke Goons were victorious. Members of the Rise YP stayed to celebrate a successful event and breathe a sigh of relief together.

In total, we raised $10,655 from our virtual trivia night! All proceeds go to the incredible work of Rise Community Development.  We want to thank our presenting sponsor, US Bank CDC, for their generous support. Huge thanks to our round sponsors and table sponsors. We could not have met our goal (or had as much fun) without them! STL Style generously provided a $250 prize package for the winning team, including St. Louis city maps, magnets, stickers, and more! Jealous? You can get your very own STL gear here: https://www.stl-style.com/

Again, thank you to everyone who joined us for trivia night this year. The Rise YP Board looks forward to seeing everyone again for our next event – virtual or otherwise!

By Jenna Hampton and Elizabeth Kastl

Photography Credits: Brittany Kampschroeder