The Colby Volunteer Center (CVC) recruited 283 student volunteers to participate in Colby Cares Day, an annual outreach event during which various groups of students volunteer off-campus.  This year’s event took place on Saturday, April 23.

While some of the outreach sites have hosted Colby Cares volunteers before, the CVC is always looking to support new local efforts.

“We have a bunch of sites we’ve been going to for a long time,” Dana Roberts ‘12, assistant director of the CVC, said. “We sit and brainstorm, ‘what else can we do?’ One of the sites we got last year was Best Buddies….And people contact us, too, which is really exciting.” 

Roberts believes that the number of volunteers participating in this year’s event was “the most we’ve ever had; we have over 20 sites all throughout the greater Waterville area.”

An immense amount of planning goes into the event each year. “We get a list of all our sites,” Roberts explained, “and we contact them giving the date we’ve set and ask for their participation…we created an online sign up [for students], which was new this year, which made things so much easier. We created a drop down menu with the different sites for people to choose from.”

Overall, she noted, the planning “was basically a jigsaw puzzle, whereby we put the kids at the right site so they could enjoy both their friends and the day.” 

Students arrived at Pulver Pavilion between 9:15 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. to sign-in, pick up their t-shirts, bagged lunches and raffle tickets, and they were at their respective work sites by 11 a.m.

After spending a few hours at their sites, students returned to the Hill for a relaxing barbecue, which was “really to celebrate the work that they’ve done that day,” Roberts said. 

Colby Cares Day is a unique CVC event in that it’s not only for regular, weekly CVC volunteers.

The CVC highly encourages students involved in all sorts of activities on campus to participate in this one day. “Our big supporters,” Roberts said, “are athletes. We get full teams to go. The way our events get big turnouts is through sports teams.” 

“We want to offer students…the opportunity to do a weekly commitment…but then for the campus to come together for a one time event on this day,” Roberts said.

“Not only is it great for the Waterville community, but it’s great for the Colby community to come out…it creates a really nice sense of community on campus.”

If you missed this year’s event, then consider signing up next year.