Tiger Serve Day (TSD) will celebrate its thirteenth year this Saturday, and members of the leadership team are hoping for a record turnout.
“[We are] hoping to have between 70 and 80 teams,” said Ian Cosh, assistant to the president for community development, and director of the Ben M. Elrod center for family and community.”
Each team is made up of eight to 10 people, equaling roughly 700 Ouachita students and faculty members, or half of the student body.
Judy Duvall, assistant director of the Elrod Center said she is proud to see that many “students serving others over self” on a Saturday morning.
The projects worked on range from doing yard work for elderly or single-parent community members, to helping people move, or doing work for local non-profits.
The Elrod Center places ads in the Daily Siftings Herald, people can call and request a team.
“The labor-intensive projects are the ones people really appreciate,” Cosh said.
Duvall works with ElderServe, so she knows many of the people helped by TSD.
“They really look forward to it,” Duvall said. “It’s encouragement for them. Even more important than the work is the relationship.”
Duvall also said that those served send cards and call the Elrod Center to thank the students who are participating “because they want to serve others.”
Students sign a card for the project they worked on, and are welcome to return to the location to help later in the semester or to build friendships in the community.
While there is a new T-shirt design every year, and new projects are added “it’s not so much the newness of it, but the consistency,” Cosh said. “It’s recommitting to service.”
The first TSD took place in March of 1997, following the tornado that hit downtown. While many community members thought the event was a response to the tornado, it was actually planned well in advance and happened to coincide. TSD is funded by the Elrod Foundation.
“People thought we were ultra-organized,” Cosh said, “but we had pre-planned it.”
The first TSD T-shirt was worn that March, done then as a safety tool to provide easy identification of Ouachita students amid the people picking up debris.
Now the T-shirt serves as both a recruiting tool—students receive a free T-shirt for participating—and as the safety tool it was designed for.
The event has always had a student leadership team, though the number of students has increased recently.
“They play a very important role in organizing the day,” Cosh said. “[They are] a vital part of the whole thing.”
The leadership team evaluates the projects and project sites, checks the directions and assigns tools and teams to each site. In addition to this, they design the T-shirts and evaluate the results after each TSD, before beginning the planning for the next semester’s TSD.
“We have some really great leaders on our team, they’re very motivated,” Duvall said. This year’s leadership team is made up of 23 students ranging from freshman to seniors. The group is split into subgroups of publicity, teams, projects and logistics.
Cami Jones, a senior early childhood education and Spanish major, is chair of the projects team. Her team finds the projects, calls them, visits them, assesses the tools needed, enters the information into a computer program and assigns a team to the project.
“It does not sound like a lot of work,” Jones said. “But believe me, it is.”
Jones is excited about the underclassmen on this year’s team and said her favorite part of TSD is “using the megaphone.”
“I love all aspects of TSD,” Jones said. “In all seriousness, I love when the teams return to campus because I get to hear their stories of TSD. It makes all our hours of hard work worthwhile.”
Turn-out has always been good, averaging about 500 students per TSD and the “interest has been there, it has become part of what we do,” said Cosh.
“We have changed the culture of service through it,” Cosh said. “It has become part of us.”
Duvall added that many students may want to participate, but do not know how. To sign up go to www.obu.edu/serve. While it is possible to sign up with a team, it is not necessary, as they will place you on a team if you sign up alone.
“Free breakfast, free shirt, free lunch. And you get to serve. Why would you not want to do it?” Jones said.
Tiger Serve Day will take place Saturday from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m.
By Ananda Boardman, Signal Writer
