UAlbany’s ‘Big Event’ Weekend Aims for Community Impact Through Service

By Bethany Bump

ALBANY, N.Y. (April 18, 2023) — If the end of the semester has you feeling stressed, you might consider giving back as a healthy way to unwind.

There will be no shortage of opportunities to do just that this weekend as the Big Event, the largest community service event of the year at UAlbany, returns for its sixth year. The event, which started in 2018 as a single day but over the years has grown to include a full weekend of activities, kicks off Friday with a campus cleanup and runs through Sunday.

“It’s scientifically proven that when you volunteer, when you give back, you are happier, you feel more connected with your community and the community at large, and you can benefit an agency forever,” said Cheryl Simmons, assistant director of the Center for Leadership and Service at UAlbany, which helps organize the event.

More than 1,000 students, faculty and staff are expected to attend some portion of the Big Event this weekend, which will feature two signature events on Saturday — the Out of the Darkness Walk and We Care project — and smaller volunteer opportunities throughout the weekend.

Simmons said the goal of the Big Event in recent years has been to go deeper, not wider with community service.

“We were touching and helping a ton of organizations, but they still needed more help outside of this day and our campus largely vacates two weeks after the Big Event,” she said. “We wanted to change how much of an impact we could make within a few organizations. So instead of having one surface-level opportunity at 20 places, how can we do some more meaningful work at 10 places? And that's where the Out of the Darkness walk came in.”

The walk, which raises funds for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, has been taking place at UAlbany and other campuses across the nation for over a dozen years. But it only became part of the Big Event in 2020, as part of an effort to create more buzz for the walk and grow awareness around the issue.

Last year’s walk raised $16,000 for the foundation. The goal this year is to raise $20,000, Simmons said. The walk kicks off at 11 a.m. Saturday with remarks from President Havidán Rodríguez and representatives in government and community relations. Check-in and pre-walk activities begin at 10 a.m.

The other signature event of the weekend is the “We Care” project in collaboration with Albany Medical Center, which provides victims who are fleeing domestic and sexual violence with clothing, toiletries and comfort care items. At 4 p.m. Saturday, volunteers will begin packing backpacks with these items and at 5 p.m. will begin loading them into ambulances to be delivered to the hospital.

“The volunteers also write a note of kindness and inspiration to go in these backpacks, just so that the person or child that's receiving it knows that someone at UAlbany cares about them and that we've packaged that backpack with love and we're thinking of them,” Simmons said.

Various other community service projects will take place throughout the weekend, including a cleanup in the Pine Hills neighborhood on Sunday, book mending with the RED Bookshelf, and a canvassing project with the American Red Cross to replace smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors in low-income neighborhoods throughout Albany.

A full list of volunteer opportunities can be found at Engage UAlbany, the University’s platform for connecting faculty, staff and students to community service opportunities.

“Even in one day, students, faculty and staff can help an agency complete work that would otherwise take them a year to complete,” Simmons said. “I don't think that many people realize how far a little bit of time can impact an organization or the ripple effect that it has in the community."