On Saturday April 10th, the University of Montevallo’s Student Government Association hosted their annual big event. This event usually involves students going out into the community but SGA Director of Social Services Jacob Heath says that it looked a little different this year.
“This year, just to keep students and the community safe, we have limited it to the least amount of in person contact as possible. So this year it’s a lot based on donation drives and instead of people going out to people’s houses like they normally would, their doing care packages for them.” said Heath.

The event usually involves students going to houses in the community and doing yard work or helping community members with whatever they need.

Boxes were set up on the Farmer Hall stage where students could come from 8 a.m. until 12 p.m. to drop off supplies to be donated. Donations went to Shelby Emergency Assistance as well as the UM Food Pantry.

“Shelby Emergency Assistance as been partnering with a lot of organizations on campus recently and I just took notice of that. They do a lot of good work and I just thought that they could use a little more assistance and help gathering donations” said Heath.

Heath also said that a lot of planning went into this event due to COVID-19.

“I would say the planning was a lot of sit down meetings where we talked about organizations we could donate to, where we wanted students to take the donations and how we were going to keep everybody safe and make this as contact free as possible” said Heath.

Items accepted as donations included Nonperishable food items as well as paper products and canned goods. The Big Event was also live streamed on SGA’s Instagram account so students could see what was being donated.

The Big Event was one of several events that SGA has done the past few weeks. Other events include a movie night on Flowerhill and a philanthropy event on Main Quad. For more information about these events and other events SGA has put on this semester, you can check out their Instagram account here .