Friday, March 22, 2005

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

OU Students Plan for The Big Event

NORMAN, Okla. – Imagine thousands of OU students, faculty and staff going out into the community to volunteer at over 240 community organizations in the Oklahoma City area for the sixth annual Big Event on Saturday, April 2. Imagine these volunteers completing tens of thousands of hours of community service in a single day and providing paints, gardening tools, flowers and other much needed supplies.

These numbers illustrate the event's growing success, but that success would not be possible without the event’s executive team, a group of 19 OU undergraduates who began planning for the event in August.

"We’re not your typical group of college students,” said Mark Moravits, chairman of The Big Event. “We have so much passion for what this event stands for, and this is undeniably evident in the success of this event over the past six years.”

The executive team is divided into eight positions: sponsorship, supplies, special events, publicity, expansion, student recruitment, community recruitment and executive operations. Four vice chairs, along with Moravits, oversee these positions and the 70 operations staff members who evaluate the work that needs to be done at all of the job sites.

The Big Event is entirely student-run, which Moravits says has made the event that much more significant.

“In the midst of full-time course loads, work and social life, we still manage to plan and execute OU’s largest student event, and what an incredible experience it has been,” Moravits said. “It’s extremely difficult for anyone to plan an event of this magnitude, so the fact that it’s run by students who have busy lives shows how much our team and university care about community service.”

Becca Stephen, microbiology sophomore, serves as the Community Recruitment Co-Chair. She, along with co-chair Josh Davis, was responsible for increasing the number of participating community organizations from 168 to 240 in a single year.

"At the beginning of the year, we decided to contact all of the community organizations that participated last year and ask them to refer us to other sites,” Stephen said. “We recruited the majority of our new job sites this way.”

With so many more community organizations participating in The Big Event this year, Stephen says she and Davis spent countless hours going through paperwork, making phone calls and assigning operations staff members to evaluate job sites.

“The time commitment has definitely been the hardest part of my job,” she said. “We’ve had to evaluate massive amounts of paperwork and compile them into master lists. We’ve also made several hundred phone calls to community organizations to find out information like what sorts of jobs they want done and how many volunteers they want.”

Thanks to Stephen and Davis, volunteers have a place to go on the day of the event, but volunteers need supplies to complete their jobs. And that's where Blake Pinard comes in. Pinard, who serves as Vice Chair for Development, oversees the evaluation of job sites and is responsible for purchasing all of the supplies.

“Because I’m responsible for evaluating all of the work that needs to be done at the job sites, I’ve had to become a handy-man by learning the how-to’s for all of the different types of work,” said Pinard.

Because the purpose of The Big Event is to help the community organizations that support the university, Pinard says his job becomes that much more important.

“The charitable organizations that The Big Event serves are very generous and exhaust themselves and their resources in order to help the community,” Pinard said. “Because they work so hard to help others, they often have little left over to help themselves. We try to help them by performing various tasks such as painting, landscaping, general maintenance, small construction and other special projects.”

To help these community organizations, Pinard says about $17,000 of landscaping equipment, plants, paints and other supplies have been purchased.

“The Big Event does this to show just how much we as a community appreciate everything that these groups do for us,” he said.

With the help of Stephen, Pinard and the other executive team members, Moravits says The Big Event has become a tremendous success and will only continue to grow in future years.

“This is what community is all about,” Moravits said. “As Sooners, this is how we define community.”

For more information about The Big Event and how to host volunteers, visit http://bigevent.ou.edu.