devoted to a cause 26 [student life] Students become creative to fund campaigns Traditionally, during a school’s spring break, students would travel to various locations like to Florida for the beach, Colorado to ski or to an exotic island on a cruise.A large number of students fromHarding, however, spent their spring breaks quite differently. This group of spring break campaigners went all over the United States, into Canada and even to Central America.These students and faculty sponsors traveled to cities to conduct vacation Bible schools, build houses and get God’s message out to everyone they met along the way. To make this kind of servitude possible, however, students had to raise funds to pay for their transportation, meals and other costs which would be incurred during the trip. To raise the funds, groups held car washes while many other groups used the restaurant resources found in Searcy, mainly Pizza Pro. “They are pretty accommodating”, Student Director of Spring Break Missions senior Nicholas May said. “You have to have a pretty good reason to bus tables, but it seems that they are really interested in our business as students.” May, along with being the student director, also went on a campaign to Nicaragua in the spring of 2007.The group goal was around $24,000, the main expense being the transportation to the Central American country. May said that what they could not raise though, the Spring Break Missions office came up with. Other groups used letter writing as their main form of fundraising. “We tried to first make up a list of people to send letters to,” senior Hayley Todd said.“We had to raise $800, so we had to have a lot of contacts to send letters to.” Todd said that when they were lacking in people to write to, the Spring Break office again came to their aid.Their group of six individuals traveled to Poughkeepsie, New York for their Spring Break mission. “Sometimes we had enough contacts, but then if we didn’t, we talked to Nate Copeland, assistant to the president, for church contacts,” Todd said. Todd said that her group stayedwith individuals from the churchwhen they arrived in New York, so their biggest expense was for transportation. “After our group went down to six people, we decided to drive instead of fly,”Todd said. “That cut our cost down in half.” Even though the stress of fundraising was weighing down on them, students like senior Rachel Kincheloe,who attended the Nicaragua campaign, still kept their main goal in mind. “It was good to get away from Harding and remind myself that not everyone is a Christian and that not everyone is wealthy,” Kincheloe said. “It was amazing to see how hungry many of these kids were for attention of any kind, they weren’t asking much, just someone to play with them.” [Jacob Spillman and Katie Ulliman]
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