1,300 hands assist in The Big Event

Many hands make light work. That’s the idea behind The Big Event, an international annual day of community service, which came to Chadron Saturday. This year, students flocked to Elliot Field at noon for sign-in, and almost 650 people volunteered to be a part of CSC’s second annual Big Event. With about 70 different job sites, volunteers did everything from sweeping to planting, all in the name of service.

The women’s choir, lead by Una Taylor, professor of music, sang at Crest View Healthcare Community. The group serenaded residents with a capella selections from their most recent concert. Nikki Bunnell, sophomore of Alliance, participated last year with NAfME. This year, the women’s choir decided to put their unique skills to work to better the community in a unique way: with music.

Dirt flew in front of Andrews as Lucinda Mays, resident horticulturalist, supervised tree planting at the dorm. With her, the International Club and Upward Bound high school students dug holes and planted native trees to “replenish the canopy,” as Mays said.

“The Big Event couldn’t have come at a better time,” Mays said, as she paused from giving students bottles of water. “We lost a lot of trees during Winter Storm Atlas.”

Mays chose the front of Andrews to receive The Big Event’s attention because the Eastern-facing building lost most of its trees during the storm. “Plus,” Mays said, “it’s a place where we can all work together, and that’s half the fun.”

Sophia Zhang, freshman from China, had never planted a tree before. She worked alongside Lauren Stevens, who was one of the Upward Bound supervisors. The Upward Bound students, a collection of economically disadvantaged and first-generation college-hopefuls from Alliance, Chadron, and Crawford, decided to help with The Big Event because of its service focus and  its proximity to this Chadron meeting.

“It really lined up nicely,” Stevens said, “to have our meeting here on campus and then right afterwards come volunteer.”

As the temperature rose with the humidity, the women’s basketball team picked up trash alongside Highway 385. With black trash bags, they beautified the grounds of Eagle Chevrolet. The car dealership also received a boost from the girls’ rugby team, who washed the cars to a sparkling shine.

Joanna Forstrum, dean of liberal arts, led a team in cleaning up the local high school’s, middle school’s, and elementary’s grounds.

“We’re always happy to help out the community to build good relationships,” Forstrum said. “But none of this would be possible without Shaunda French. She brought The Big Event here from Southern Mississippi, where she helped organize a Big Event there as a graduate assistant.”

French organized CSC’s The Big Event by entrusting a group of select interns to head Chadron’s version of the international event.

Elsewhere in Chadron, a large collection of students, including tutors from the Learning Center, helped long-time residents Freddie Sipman and Dwight Garnhart clean out their garage. Piles of dusty boom boxes and old Christmas lights littered the front of Hillside apartments as the volunteers sorted and stored the belongings.

A little ways down 8th street, the football team was hard at work groundskeeping in Wilson Park. The different platoons raked and shoveled, boasting at each other that their group had the best mulch-spreaders. Coach Long and his daughter, Kaelee, also helped.

“She’s in charge around here,” footballers called from their buckets of mulch. Kaelee is a 10-year old student at Chadron Middle School, but she brandished a shovel with the best of them.

“The community does a lot for the football team,” Jake McLain, a graduate assistant of Chadron, said. “It’s nice to give back.”

Although many teams volunteered as a group, individual students also came together to create major change. At the Child Development Center, one such group painted, cleaned, and organized the playthings. One volunteer, Morgan Carrico, junior of Craig, Colorado, spray-painted a smiling sun on the cement. Above her in the sky, the sun was also shining, but the students didn’t seem to mind.

“I’ve always been really big into community service,” Carrico said. “It’s a way to show some community pride.”

Just before the volunteers called it a day, Carrico had an accident. She was using a small knife to cut ribbon from a fence, and the blade slipped, cutting her thumb. After a trip to the emergency room for stitches, Carrico still danced later that night in the Nu Delta Alpha recital in Memorial Hall. Giving the audience a gauze-bandaged thumbs-up, Carrico exemplified the indomitable volunteer.

“We live here,” she said, “so we might as well show some pride in it.”

Other hard-workers could be found at Outlaw Printers. The group, who expected outdoors work, was instead greeted with the disheveled upstairs of the local printer. Last year, volunteers also tackled the space, hauling away truck-loads of cardboard.

“They just couldn’t finish last year,” Matt Reeves, Outlaw’s owner, said.

This year, the team did manage to clean out the whole area, hauling old refrigerators and boxes down the fire escape. Apolonia Calleja, senior of San Diego, led the group. Calleja is one of The Big Event’s interns, and the Reeves are her host parents.

“We all do it for the same reason,” Calleja said, as she looked at her group, “civic engagement.”

The Reeves, who bought Outlaw in 2013, hope to apply for a downtown improvement grant and turn the cleaned-out space into apartments.

As the day wound—down, students at the Chadron Library were putting away their rakes and tying off bulging bags of leaves. A combination of Rotaract and Phi Beta Lambda students, the group volunteered to support their clubs’ commitments to community service. Chris Tingley, professor of marketing and PBL sponsor, even brought his two sons, Aiden and Orrin, along to help. The young boys piled leaves with the college students, and two other children from the community, who stopped by and asked if they could help too, soon joined them.

“I told them they could, if they asked their parents,” Site Supervisor Abby Lane, sophomore of Cheyenne, Wyoming, said. Sure enough, the kids returned with parental consent, and the library’s clean-up became a truly communal affair.

Despite the varied and enthusiastic service from everyone involved, the most impressive aspect of Saturday’s The Big Event was everyone’s willingness to help.

Students signed up, completely unaware of what they would be asked to do, and got down to business when the time came. Regardless of the task: moping, shoveling, sweeping, raking, or painting, volunteers got their hands dirty with an uncommon zeal. Tasks which would have taken individuals days were completed by teams in hours.

Almost 1,300 hands joined together Saturday, and they made the work, and Chadron, that much lighter.