Elizabeth Heffernan | Copy Co-Editor
50 yards of fleece, $395 dollars, 25 volunteers, and three hours later, 25 fleece blankets were tied and prepared for donation.
On Sunday, May 11 from 4-7 p.m., Buena Vista University (BVU) Grand, Liberty, and Swope resident advisors (RA) held their last event of the semester: a service event where BVU students could make the trek to Grand lounge and help tie fleece blankets to donate to the Bridge in Storm Lake, IA.
Sophomores Shaylia Barber, Meghan Harmening, and Bailey Hanson were the leaders for this project.
“We were trying to think of something other groups hadn’t done but would still be worthwhile,” Barber said. “There is a Beavers model, and each letter stands for a program we have to do, and the last one is service. The RA program gets a fairly large budget so we had several hundred dollars left to use.”
“A lot of our blankets are kid-sized blankets, and our aim was to give them to children. A lot of kids don’t have something that’s theirs. 90% of the time they don’t have something that’s just for them. We wanted to give them a comforting gift,” Barber said.
Besides BVU students, groups from around campus including AmeriCorps, an Alternative Week of Offsite Learning (AWOL) group, Student Senate, Student Activities Board, and StudentMOVE had all been invited to participate in the event.
“A little over a week ago we went to Walmart and wiped their shelves of fleece,” Barber said. “We got 25 blankets, 14 kid sizes and the remainder adult blankets. We wanted to make sure we had enough material for all the groups we invited.”
Senior Caitlin Hoffman was one of the participants at the event. She came to help fulfill the post-service requirement for her AWOL group, after emailing Meghan Harmening about possible service opportunities.
“Going off of the AWOL element,” Hoffman said, “Going to New York at that time of year, it’s cold. The idea of tying blankets was appealing because there are cold children everywhere and cold people everywhere.”
Bringing the service element back to the Storm Lake community and getting the rest of the students involved was a big part of the night. Part of the reason Residence Life chose this event to fulfill the service requirement was because it was easy to do, it was on campus, and it still positively impacted the community.
“Meghan and Shaylia really wanted to do this, and since it’s our last event of the year…we have a lot of budget left over and we thought this would be good because we could spend all the money we have left to get more material and give blankets to more people” senior Brady Stier, member of the ResLife team who developed the idea, said.
How do 25 tie blankets help the community?
“Especially here in the Midwest, it gets cold a lot. Even if it’s for somebody who needs it to stay warm or just a kid to give them something for a gift or make them happy…everyone needs something positive in their life even if it’s just a blanket,” Stier said.
