Festival foods, crafts, partnership tables and live music filled Young Commons for Elon University Residence Life’s first ResFest event. 

ResFest was created as part of a new Residence Life initiative to increase engagement between the different residential neighborhoods on campus. The event took place Oct. 25 and featured a competition to see which neighborhood and Living Learning Community had the highest attendance while fostering pride in students’ individual neighborhoods and meeting new people. 

Community Directors Anna Kyles and Jasmine Hill Evans organized the event and said it was created to bring students from all neighborhoods on campus out of their localized bubbles. 

“I know it can feel a little siloed with the neighborhoods,” Kyles said. “So we wanted to create an initiative to bring everybody together in one big space, have fun and kind of make it sort of a competition.”

The idea of neighborhood competitions started last year with rebranding the neighborhood logos and choosing neighborhood colors, Sarah Ann Chapman, associate director of Residence Life for residential education and community development, said. 

“We wanted to try to focus on a way to help students have pride in their neighborhoods,” Chapman said. “We wanted to have students make connections in their neighborhoods, and we want them to be excited about wherever they live.”

Unlike the Global Neighborhood’s structured house cup competition for the first six weeks of the school year, Chapman said the neighborhood competition initiative does not have a formal system. 

“For us, it was more about celebrating each neighborhood, but then providing opportunities throughout the semester, throughout the year, for neighborhoods to come together and either celebrate or have challenges and competitions,” Chapman said. 

This school year, the initiative kicked off with a partnership with Elon Athletics to create neighborhood nights for sporting events including home football, men’s soccer, women’s soccer and volleyball games. Elon Athletics Assistant Director of Marketing Zoe Mooney said the nights are a great collaboration for both parties. 

“It kind of was benefiting both sides,” Mooney said. “So we got more students, but they also get a free and fun event that they can have as a community,”

As for ResFest, Kyles said the event was about bringing together the neighborhoods for some fun. 

“It just kind of goes back to that sense of belonging, and making meaning, making sense of your experience here, and definitely building those meaningful relationships,” Kyles said. “This is just a way to bring everybody together into one place to have fun and to be safe while you do it.”

The event included many activities, among them a variety of food offerings such as popcorn, cotton candy and Pelican’s Snow Cones. There were also yard games, face painting and a balloon artist. A zone called the Chill Zone was also set up with many different craft activities such as rock painting, stress ball making and coloring. Music was provided by both 89.3 FM WSOE and student band Yard’s Davis. 

Evans said it was important that the event’s campus partners had tables at the event, including Counseling Services, Elon Athletics, Student Conduct and the Residence Hall Association. 

“It was really important for us to partner with a lot of different people for this program,” Evans said. “I would love to see greek organizations and clubs out here in the future, just so there's a staple event similar to an org fair or something that happens every year.”

For freshman Grayce Bechtel, the event was a good opportunity for the neighborhoods to be together. 

“The way our neighborhoods are set up, they're kind of split,” Bechtel said. “It's good for everybody to meet and mingle among the neighborhoods. You get to really meet the full community and all the perspectives.” 

In the end, East Neighborhood came out as the winner with the highest percentage of the neighborhood in attendance. Global Neighborhood was awarded second place and Historic Neighborhood placed third. The Living Learning Community awarded for the highest percentage of attendance went to the Communications Living Learning Community. 

Residence Life plans to continue these neighborhood competition events in November with the Neighborhood Food Fight food donation competition from Nov. 11 to Nov. 15. Students can participate in this event by taking non-perishable food items to their neighborhood office during that week.