All housing communities on campus hold events like festivals, spirit events or co-rec sports. While Hinman College also holds events like these, it asserts that its main focus is on community service. This semester, Hinman College is giving back by making a children’s storybook for Binghamton University’s Campus Pre-School and Early Childhood Center.
The book, “Tiki’s Adventures in Hinman,” follows Hinman College’s mascot, Tiki the lemur, as he travels from building to building in the community, learning a different value at each residence hall, like service, leadership, community and tradition. He teaches these values to the children along his journey. For example, when Tiki visits Lehman Hall, he sees his friend Lehman playing co-rec soccer and joins in, and through the game, he learns spirit and pride in his community. At another point in the book, Tiki stops by Roosevelt Hall, learning the value of tradition by seeing residents practice an annual skit for dorm wars.
The inspiration for the book came from a desire to help children in the Binghamton area community. The community members eventually narrowed their target audience to the Campus Pre-School, according to Rebecca Rios, Roosevelt Hall’s vice president of service and leadership and a freshman majoring in business administration.
“I was looking into local organizations that help children and some of them were saying that they’re looking for books and they had a list of specific books they wanted, and that gave me the idea to write our own book about Hinman College and make a whole story about it,” Rios said. “We’re gonna go to the Campus Pre-School and do a reading for them and give the book to them at the end.”
Once Rios suggested her idea to residents of the other buildings, the writing process quickly began, with each of Hinman College’s hall governments working to come up with the best way to demonstrate Hinman College’s values in a kid-friendly way. On Thursday night, each building had a drawing session where students could help out with the illustration of the book. The illustration sessions mostly focused on drawing Tiki as he went from building to building.
Brandon Vaglio, a sophomore majoring in biomedical engineering, said being a part of the bookmaking process was important to him as a community member.
“I have an interest in how kids grow and I feel like the ideas Hinman preaches can help promote positive development in terms of character,” he said. “I think the kids would appreciate a book like this.”
Residents of Hinman College will be reading “Tiki’s Adventures in Hinman” to the children at the Campus Pre-School on Monday, Nov. 20.
Colleen Magowan, co-president of Roosevelt Hall and a sophomore double-majoring in biology and French, said she felt this book was the perfect way to give back.
“[Rios] had this idea of sharing the things we value with the little kids and I thought that was a really good thing to do,” she said. “We always talk about the Hinman spirit and it’s just a really special feeling that the Hinman community — we’re just one big family.”