Badin Hall hosted its second-annual bake-off Friday from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. in the Duncan Student Center, near the Hagerty Family Cafe.
The bake-off presented an opportunity for all halls across Notre Dame’s campus to donate "dorm-made" baked goods in order to raise money for St. Margaret’s House. Displayed across three different tables, cookies, brownies, pies, cakes and even pizza bagels were sold at $3 per baked good or $5 for two. At the end of the event, the hall which sold the most baked goods won.
St. Margaret’s House is a day center for women, according to its website, helping women and children in the South Bend community who are in need or in crisis by providing food, clothing, shelter and offering various programs.
“Badin has always supported St. Margaret's House historically, and during the pandemic connections had kind of fallen off,” said Caroline Potts, a junior and the president of Badin Hall. “So this year, our hall government's main goal was to reestablish that connection, and we have through monthly item drives off of their ‘Items of Need’ list. We've done service on volunteer trips, about twice a month. We started that in October, and then all of our signature events, there's three of them this year, all go to support St. Margaret's House.”
Even though Badin Hall has always helped St. Margaret’s House, Potts said the volunteer work and service Badin Hall does for the House is personal and important to the entire dorm.
”The students in Badin Hall and the girls who live here are just so loving and so caring, and there's such a desire to do good for others. So, we really want to make sure that that just isn't a thought left behind, that it's a focus of our year so that we can, at the end of the year, look back and realize that we've done something good for others,” Potts said.
Junior Kat Smith, special events coordinator for Badin Hall, said she was excited for this year’s bake-off.
“Last year, it was a bit of an experiment, but it was pretty successful for the first time around,” Smith said. “I made the key lime pies last year, [and] I made about double this year because they went pretty quick.”
Smith said they raised around $2,000 for St. Margaret’s last year from the bake-off alone, and she said she hopes they will raise another $2,000 this year.
The bake-off originated as a substitute event for the Badin Hall Polar Plunge, which was shut down during COVID-19 because the lakes on the tri-campus were closed.
Smith, who also helped with the bake-off last year, said they decided to start the event because “no one else does anything like it,” and the hall as a whole believed it would be fun.
Even with the emergence of the bake-off, Potts still plans on bringing the polar plunge back this year. This will be the first time since 2018 that the event will be offered to tri-campus students.
Smith believes Badin Hall will be able to donate around $6,000 this school year through the Walk a Mile in Her Shoes fundraiser earlier this year, the bake-off and the polar plunge combined.
