This Saturday, Tiger Serve Day will kick off a year of celebration, marking 20 years since the Elrod Center founded the event centered on community service.
The event occurs once every semester and sends teams of students into the Arkadelphia community to assist with individual needs. Service projects assigned to teams range from yard work to cleaning to basic repair projects. Around 70 percent of Ouachita’s campus, including students, faculty and staff, participates in Tiger Serve Day each semester, and the Elrod Center hopes to see over 1,000 volunteers work on 80 to 100 service projects this weekend.
“It’s almost two-thirds of our campus, which is just remarkable,” said Judy Duvall, assistant director of the Elrod Center. “I don’t think you could find another school anywhere that would have that many students show up early in the morning to go out into the community.”
The day will kick off for volunteers at 8:30 a.m., when teams will check in and team leaders will pick up supplies from the Elrod Center. Teams will gather on 6th Street in front of the Elrod Center, where team numbers will be written in chalk, to eat breakfast and discuss their plan for the day. Once the day has been prayed for, teams will leave to complete their assigned service projects. Projects are typically finished by noon.
In honor of Tiger Serve Day’s 20th anniversary, this year’s theme is “Into the Streets,” which is what Tiger Serve Day was called during the first event in 1997. Though the actual anniversary will not occur until the spring, the Elrod Center wants to use the entire year to celebrate 20 years of service. It is commonly believed that Tiger Serve Day was started as a relief effort after a tornado devastated the Arkadelphia community, but plans were already in motion for a day of service before the tornado hit.
“We had bought the equipment, we had bought t-shirts, we were ready to go, and out of the blue the tornado hit,” said Ian Cosh, vice president for community and international engagement. After the tornado left the entire community in need, the focus of the day shifted toward disaster relief. The Ouachita community was already equipped with supplies and willing volunteers; the storm simply provided a greater drive to meet a significant need in the community.
“We were able to start serving through that…and the fact that it’s been sustained for that long, we just want to make it a big deal and get as many volunteers as we can,” said Madi Polk, a junior elementary education major from Wylie, Texas and projects chair on the Tiger Serve Day leadership team.
In the 20 years since the first Tiger Serve Day, the number of volunteers each semester has increased, and volunteers have put in more than 77,000 hours of community service through Tiger Serve Day alone.
As part of the 20th anniversary celebration, the Elrod Center has invited local Ouachita alumni and former leadership team members to come back to Arkadelphia to participate in Tiger Serve Day alongside current students, faculty and staff.
Tiger Serve Day has long acted as a catalyst for other types of service through the Elrod Center. Tiger Serve Day leadership encourages participants to talk to, pray for and form relationships with the people they are serving, and as a result, several of the elderly citizens assisted through Tiger Serve Day are also connected to the Elrod Center’s ElderServe program.
“I love the way our programs intersect,” Duvall said. “For some people that volunteer on this day, it’s an entrance to service. If they’re not involved in a particular organization…this kind of gives them that experience of service and gets them excited about doing more of it.”
Individuals may still sign up to volunteer for Tiger Serve Day at obu.edu/elrod/serve. For more information, contact Judy Duvall at duvallj@obu.edu.
By: Katie Kemp, News Editor
