Madeleine Coles
Staff Writer
ISU will be hosting the sixth annual Celebrate Idaho State event in the Pond Student Union on Wednesday, Feb. 10. While this event has been going on for six years, this year the committee planning the event hoped to change things up a little bit.
“In the past it’s been more like a trade show where you just walk through booths and get some freebies,” said Allyson Johnson, ISU special events coordinator. “But this year we’re trying to make it interactive. We’re focusing a lot on families with kids.”
Though Johnson hopes to make the event more interactive by featuring games, prizes and activities, the event will still feature booths where all of the colleges at ISU can showcase their programs.
“A lot of our departments will have information on what they do,” Johnson said, adding, “but even the departments that just hand out information will still have fun stuff such as a balloon pop or mini golf. We really stressed to make it interactive this year.”
The event will feature a basketball hoop game, a football throw, an inflatable playground obstacle course and live animals. The massage therapy program will also be giving chair massages.
“There should be something for everybody,” Johnson said.
This is also the first year the event will feature a theme: athletics.
“Student athletes will be there from all the different sports teams running the games, so kids can interact with them,” Johnson said.
She added that they hope to focus on a different theme every year. The next few years will feature the health sciences, performing arts and science and engineering. Johnson stressed that although the event will now feature a specific theme, every program is still welcome to participate.
“We’re just trying to focus it a little more so it’s something different for the audience every year,” Johnson said.
The Celebrate Idaho State event started with Valorie Watkins, an active community member and former director of alumni relations at ISU.
Watkins said that everything started a number of years ago when she became concerned about the coverage that ISU was receiving in the media, which she said was not favorable.
After talking to the vice president of advancement for the university, Watkins organized a meeting to discuss what to do. Those meetings then led to the idea to create a couple of events that would present the university in a positive light.
“We wanted to create a stronger bond between the community and the university,” Watkins said.
They started having regular meetings to plan these events.
“I knew we needed to call it something,” Watkins said, “and the word CommUniversity was my brainstormer idea because I thought it brought the two together.”
The committee then came up with the idea for two events. The first was the Welcome Back, Orange and Black event that happens at the beginning of every school year. Watkins said it was a way for the community to welcome students to campus and show the entire university population that Pocatello was happy to have them there.
The second event was Celebrate Idaho State, which was designed to let the university tell its story to the community.
“We wanted to say, ‘this is what we bring to Pocatello,’” Watkins said.
Despite the success of the events, Watkins said that after five years of planning both of these events, they decided new blood was a good idea, so they turned Celebrate Idaho State over to ISU to handle.
Both Watkins and Johnson agree that the Celebrate Idaho State has helped community and university relations.
“Just yesterday I got a phone call from a woman in the community who said that she has a group of teenage girls that she always brings, and she loves it because it gets them on a college campus,” Johnson said. “Also over the last few years we’ve been doing this I’ve noticed a lot more Bengal decorations around town, so that’s good.”
Events such as Welcome Back, Orange and Black and Celebrate Idaho State are now staples of the ISU community, and it’s almost hard to imagine what life at ISU would be like without them.
“I think these events have had a dramatic effect on the university and the community,” Watkins said. “I love this university. I’m passionate about it, and I want to see only the best. So if I can help in that regard then that’s what I’ll do.”
