The Student Association at Mississippi State University is holding Bulldog Benefit Saturday to help clean up campus.
This is the third or fourth year the SA has held the benefit, and it’s a campus cleanup project that was first started by Holli Hitt, SA community service director Stacey Ritter said. This year 275 volunteers including around 30 club groups signed up for the project, she said.
“Every year we’re trying to get more and more student volunteers, and I think we’ve had a good response this year,” Ritter said.
“We’re doing this to help keep our campus beautiful, and I hope that everybody who signed up will come,” she said.
The event and registration will begin at 9:30 a.m. on the Drill Field outside The Union, and will last until noon, when pizza will be served for lunch and a raffle will be held for winning a door prize, Ritter said.
The volunteers will be broken down into groups and provided with leaders, she said. Then they will be assigned a part of campus to clean based on their group size and clubs, such as the engineering society cleaning up around places like engineering row, Ritter said.
Other groups will go into the community to help put mulch in church flowerbeds and clean up some roads in the Starkville area, she said.
The community service committee went to Tim Lacy, the director of campus landscaping, to see if the landscaping department would donate trash bags and gloves for picking up the trash, and he was more than willing to help out because of how important the look of campus is to the university, SA assistant director of community service Henry Minor said.
Lacy also came up with the idea of some of the volunteers putting out 1,000 bails of pine straw in the northern entrance of campus in preparation for Super Bulldog Weekend, Minor said.
“The event shows the faculty, and specifically the campus landscaping department, how much we appreciate the work that they’re doing to keep this campus looking as good as it does,” he said.
If anyone is still interested in sign up they can, and, although the T-shirts will be given to the volunteers who have already signed up, it’s never too late participate in the project, Ritter said.
“I’m willing to help out because I really like the idea of students volunteering to clean up the campus because it shows we do care.” he said
Jesse Mitchell, a landscape architecture major.
Anyone who wants to sign up can email Ritter at [email protected].