University community gives back in a big way during One Day, One Dog

By Chuck Gordon

Destiny Urdaneta has loved serving others during One Day, One Dog throughout her time at Wingate, but she'd never been in charge of her own project before this year. When it came time to decide which direction to go in, the senior educational-studies major naturally thought of helping students.

Urdaneta organized an assembly line of students and employees in the Student Organization Suite to pack craft kits to hand out to kindergarteners and first-graders at Wingate Elementary School. She was planning to personally deliver them to the school once all 150 bags full of colored pencils, activity sheets, sharpeners, erasers, stickers and more were ready to go.

"I know kids that age get pretty excited about any little thing they get," she says, "so I'm excited to see their faces and their reactions."

"Kids Educational Kits" was one of dozens of service projects members of the Wingate community could sign up for today during the annual One Day, One Dog Day of Giving and Service. The event started in 2016 as part of the inauguration of Wingate's current president, Dr. Rhett Brown, and has been a signature event ever since, serving as a day of widespread volunteering as well as the University's largest day of fundraising.

Classes were canceled for the day, and more than 1,000 students and employees took advantage of that time to go out and serve. Service projects ranged from tidying up around the Campus Lake to cheering on members of the IDD (intellectual and developmental disabilities) community during their annual baseball game at Ron Christopher Stadium.

Volunteers helped plant flowers and vegetables at the community garden, made origami cranes to give to donors and nonprofits, served breakfast at the Union County Community Shelter, and did maintenance and building projects at Habitat for Humanity.

At Wingate Baptist Church, members of the University's chapter of the American Marketing Association helped elderly Wingate and Marshville residents in the local Department of Social Services' Senior Nutrition program to pot succulent plants, which they could take home with them, before sitting down to visit. Ariana Espinosa, a senior finance major (and marketing minor) turned a class project in 2025 into a One Day, One Dog project with Senior Nutrition after seeing how valuable it was to simply sit down and listen to the community members who make use of the program every day.

"Seniors often don't have an opportunity to talk to people," she says. "They have a lot of things to say. It's just that they don't have people to listen to their stories."

Roommates Seth McEachern, a junior from Charlotte, and Kanada Legette, a senior from Raeford, N.C., decided to help out at the community garden, beside the Neu Building, so they could get outside in the fresh air. They weren't expecting to come away with some knowledge too. While dropping seeds in soil and weeding raised beds, they learned the ins and outs of gardening.

"I definitely thought they were going to be, 'Tomatoes - plant them right here,'" says McEachern, a communications major. "I enjoyed it, and I learned a lot. They said that the reason they put everything in the middle that the bees like is so they pollinate the middle and then work out from there."

"It's not bad," says Legette, a double major in psychology and sociology. "Pick weeds, learn about soil, learn how to plant potatoes, some peppers, onions."

In the Efird Building, freshman Luke Floyd from Matthews was taking his first stab at creating an origami crane. After he'd folded his sheet as directed a few times, Jeff Knull, adjunct math instructor and the leader of the project, gave him a few pointers.

"You want to pop it here, and then push these two together and it's going to fold and you're going to have a diamond," he said. "You're in great shape! I would go and reinforce that again. Very good. You're a pro."

After about 15 minutes, Floyd wasn't quite an expert, but he was getting the hang of it.

"It's way harder than I thought it would be," he said. "I watched the video that they sent out, and I was like, 'Oh, I can do that.'"

A steady stream of students visited Efird to make cranes, which is good, because Knull's goal was to wind up 1,000 of them.

"What we'd love to do is send a crane to everybody who makes a gift on One Day, One Dog," he says, with any left over to be given to the nonprofit Origami For Good, which distributes them to children's hospitals, military members and nonprofits.

He'll need more than 1,000, then. As of late afternoon, the University had long since passed the 1,000-donor mark, sitting at 1,083, with more than $410,000 pledged. The Day of Giving portion of One Day, One Dog will continue until midnight, so there's still time to make your pledge.

Back at the Student Org Suite, Urdaneta's project was so well organized that all 150 bags had been packed and loaded into boxes after 25 minutes of work. Urdaneta couldn't help but smile.

"I have been passionate about service since high school," she said. "Every year I've participated in One Day, One Dog. It's something I really appreciate and love, because you don't hear about a lot of schools taking a day to go out into the community and serve others, and that's something I really appreciate and love about Wingate: the service aspect of the University and how much we care about giving back to our community."

March 19, 2026