When Ole Miss students select Mr. and Miss Ole Miss to represent the student body each fall, the two are tasked with developing a philanthropy. Perhaps no one has embodied this call to service as well as this year’s Mr. Ole Miss, Cade Slaughter.
“What can we do?” is the question that Slaughter and Miss Ole Miss, Lilli Gordon, had for the university development team, after deciding the three “pillars” they wanted to pursue: fine arts, mental health and literacy. Thus, the Forward It Fund was born.
Just a few weeks ago, though, Slaughter was focused on another service event, Big Event. The largest one-day service project in the State of Mississippi, this year marked a return from 2019, after COVID-19 forced its cancellation in the early days of the pandemic last year.
“It’s a lot going on, but it’s really fun stuff,” Slaughter said. “Last year, when (Big Event) got cancelled, I was upset. Bringing it back was such a good feeling, to have a part in bringing it back.”
Slaughter was chosen as Co-Director of this year’s Big Event, and he oversaw a radically different day of service than those in years past.
For one, the number of volunteers able to participate had to be reduced to guarantee that pandemic guidelines would be met. Whereas previous Big Events yielded upwards of 1,300 student volunteers, and the 2018 edition set a record with 2,000 participants, registration was capped this year at 700. All spots were filled.
“It went really great. It was awesome to meet that goal, and do it all safely,” Slaughter said.
The kind of community projects offered this year varied too. The 2018 Big Event tackled 250 projects, which are usually requested by members of the Lafayette Oxford University (LOU) community, and can range from doing landscape in an elderly person’s yard to helping city and county workers to working at community centers.
With the ongoing pandemic, Slaughter and the executive team were forced to scrap any residential projects, choosing not to send volunteers to people’s homes out of caution. They also cancelled the opening ceremony for the event. Instead, all projects took place outdoors, at locations like churches and schools, and doing things like washing buses. After Big Event concluded on March 21, Slaughter was able to announce with Gordon the launch of the Forward it Fund.
Slaughter posted the launch of the fund to his Instagram story on Monday, March 29, which can be found on Ignite Ole Miss, the university’s official crowdfunding platform. It is essentially the Ole Miss version of GoFundMe, and everything from food pantry donations to scholarship endowments is housed on the site, where anybody can give. Nearly $360,000 has been raised on the platform, from over 1,400 donors.
Most of the funds up on the site are temporary, with a fundraising goal and a designated end date. The site displays the amount that has been donated for each one, what percentage of the goal has been reached and how many days are left. Once the deadline passes, the pages are taken down.
Some funds greatly overperform, like the Dewey Knight Scholarship established in the name of a late employee who was associate director of the Center for Student Success and First-Year Experience. With nine days left, that fund has raised 146% of its $30,000 goal (nearly $44,000).
The Forward It Fund is different. Slaughter and Gordon worked with university development to make their fund permanent, with no official monetary goal or end date. They wanted to ensure that the three pillars they chose could benefit for as long as possible.
“We’re shooting for the stars and hoping for the best,” Slaughter said. “(The fund) will be here for as long as they want to keep it up. So, I hope they keep it up for a while and people keep contributing to it.”
In just the first days of the fund, Slaughter said it has garnered “a few hundred dollars.” Despite not having an official fundraising goal, he is initially hoping to raise $1,000 for each entity. Those entities are the University Counseling Center (UCC), the University Museum and the UM Center for Excellence in Literacy Instruction (CELI), which satisfy the three pillars of mental health, fine arts and literacy, respectively. Donors can choose to which of the three to donate by selecting on the Ignite site.
“This is the cool thing with how we’ve been forced to think this year with COVID. All of the material things that maybe we would’ve done are things that you have to be cautious about. Being a financial fund means we’re able to reach a lot of alumni and older Mr. and Miss Ole Miss’s,” Slaughter said.
On how he and Gordon chose the three pillars and the entities to fund, Slaughter said that they were things the two felt passionate about, and so with the help of university development, they identified UCC, the museum and CELI as three entities that had been hurt by COVID, either by a lack of resources or funding opportunities.
For example, the UM Museum, which usually hosts a gala as its main fundraising event of the year, has been unable to do so. And so, the Forward It Fund will help these organizations to provide integral services to the community.
Although the fund is not in itself a physical project, the call to serve has not been lost on Slaughter. As part of the Forward It Fund campaign, he and Gordon will complete a service project for each of the three pillars.
With the William Magee Center for Wellness Education, the two are hosting a “Mental Health Awareness Day,” in which students will be able to wear a button displaying how they are feeling that day, such as “loved,” “down,” “affirmed,” “confident,” etc. These buttons will be available for pickup in the Union Plaza and by picking one up, the student will get to talk to Slaughter, Gordon or a Magee Center representative about available resources for mental health.
For fine arts, the UM Museum is donating art supplies to the local Boys and Girls Club for the children to produce artwork. Then, the museum will host an art showcase, so the parents of the participating children can come and see the artwork that their children produced.
Finally, Slaughter and Gordon are planning to host two virtual readings for the children at Willie Price Lab School, which is the preschool located on campus. With reading proficiency and literacy in Mississippi still at an underwhelming rate, Slaughter hopes that funding the CELI will help to make an impact.
“I hope our legacy is that we encouraged people to know more about what all is going on, on our campus,” Slaughter said, “in terms of helping each other out and caring for each other.”
For more information or to contribute to the Forward It Fund, visit Ignite.OleMiss.edu.
