UCA students lent helping hands to the Conway community during The Big Event on March 8.

Starting at 7:45 a.m., students poured into the Estes football stadium to check in and then gather around team leaders set up at numbers representing different volunteer job sites.

Some fruit and water were provided as a quick breakfast and Shadrach’s Coffee came out and set up a table to provide some extra refreshments.

The opening ceremony started around 8:15 a.m. and featured UCA President Houston Davis, the event organizer, the social media coordinator and a few others.

A group photo was taken in front of the stage before they announced who received various door prizes and other giveaways. 

Participants were then all dismissed to spread across Conway to their designated job sites by 9 a.m.

Junior Madison Speight served as the executive director of The Big Event this year and said its purpose was “to give back to the community for housing us as a college and just giving back to us so we can give back to them.”

“We start planning this all the way back in like June or July. Pretty much we start out with our sponsorships then we start reaching out to residents. And every year, we try and find bigger and better ways to reach out to them and reach more people,” Speight said.

“So a lot of our residents are elderly. They’re just parents who have a lot of different tasks going on. A lot of it is like yard work, like raking. We’ve done a lot of different things. We paint rooms. We painted cabinets last year. We do general cleaning, just things like that,” she said.

Speight said they “have a little under one thousand volunteers who are registered and around ninety job sites this year. And we have, I think, every sorority and fraternity participating this year.”

One of those fraternities was Pi Kappa Alpha who were volunteering at 1932 Caldwell St.

Senior Wesley Bridges was one such individual.

He said, “I’ve been doing The Big Event for three years now. First year was unaffiliated with any fraternity. For the past two years, I’ve been affiliated with Pi Kappa Alpha, known as Pike, and I just wanted to do this. I always do, like, some community work every year, and doing it with my brothers also, like, really encourages us to do something bigger.”

Bridges said they helped out by “pulling out the flower bed, then re-mulching, and that’s about it, planting plants, and now we’re hauling off the dirt.”

Freshman Vada Neil volunteered as a team leader for work being done at 12 Timberlane Trail where a group of girls “tilled up the gardens.”

“We dug up this huge stump, which was not easy, and now we’re inside, painting the walls and window frames,” she said.

Another volunteer from the Timberlane Trail group, Senior Toganga Leslie, said, “I just think, well, it’s a lot of character development depending on, like, how you get all your comfort zone.”

“Because today we did some gardening, and I do not know anything about gardening, so I learned a little bit about that, and at first I was not doing it correctly. So there’s a lot of real-world skills because you also communicate with the people that you’re working with and I think that that’s really helpful in the real world” she said.