The Rust College Lady Bearcats Basketball team’s bus pulled onto the North Mississippi campus in February 2022. On a nearby stage, singer Anita Ward stood performing her hit song, “Ring My Bell,” while students and faculty danced to the music. The athletes exited the bus while carrying the trophy that signified their freshly earned status as 2022 Gulf Coast Athletic Conference champions. The crowd, there for the Home Depot “Retool Your Campus” competition, applauded the Lady Bearcats’ victory.
“The girls had just arrived on campus, so we got to celebrate them during the event,” Rust College Vice President for Institutional Advancement Tiffani Perry told the Mississippi Free Press. “The morale of the student body, it just kicked up a notch.”
In its 14th year, the Home Depot “Retool Your School” grant program awards three types of campus-improvement grants to historically Black colleges and universities, ranging from $40,000 to $150,000, using an online voting challenge. Perry described the huge social-media campaigns and videos other HBCUs started to encourage people to vote for them. She learned that engaging with students during the pre-voting phase was key to added success.
“We were like, ‘Wait a minute. We gotta do better. We can compete. We’re a little school, but we got this,’” Perry recalled. “So, for this year, we actually started our planning before the end of (last) year.”
Last year, Rust College placed 10th in the online voting challenge, earning a $20,000 grant that went toward renovating the school’s student plaza. Photo courtesy Home Depot
The school also sent emails to its constituents to remind them of the voting period and to excite them about voting. Taking the lessons of the last year and applying them this year helped the school place ninth in the voting competition, securing $40,000 for the Holly Springs, Miss., HBCU. Last year, the school won 10th place.
“Hopefully, next year, we’ll see even more as a result of that,” she said.
A beautiful part about the grant program is that it gave the school an opportunity to survey its students and use their input to decide which projects
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