ACU held its first Wildcats Serving Day on March 28 with an impressive 250-plus participants across the state serving local communities.
Craig Fisher, director of Alumni Relations and Annual Projects, said the Serving Day idea started from Houston because of volunteer opportunities.
“We had done some service opportunities in some of our markets, and down in Houston is where it started,” Fisher said. “We decided to take each of our markets where we have a university relations manager: Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, (Abilene) and Austin and put together a day of service.”
All citizens of each city were welcome to help out at each city’s non-profit that they had chosen.
ACU chose Global Samaritan as its local non-profit to serve. Global Samaritan was an easy choice as the director is an ACU alum. The plan for the day was to work for three hours at Global Samaritan, but because of the response from the community, they got everything done in two.
“We had a great response with over 250 people,” Fisher said. “From alumni to prospective students and their families, and it started a new opportunity for us to mobilize our alumni base to help out in the community.”
Jason Groves, chief marketing officer, said that development for the project has been in the works for over a year.
“Over the past year we have been talking about what it might look like to do this someday,” Groves said. “We started to get real serious with the planning within the last six months. We have ACU representatives in major markets in Texas, so coordinating with them did take a little bit of time to put together.”
Fisher says ACU plans to continue this tradition, and the university has begun planning for future outreaches. Groves said the future may involve more West Texas cities since multiple alumni are there as well.
“We have a lot of alumni in West Texas,” Groves said. “We might be able to have an alum who is a champion for that and to see how many people will be involved. Even out of state and across the world, and asking all alumni would be great.”
