First of its kind “Umbrella Relay” project aims to keep students dry

With a week of rain forecasted, an umbrella-sharing pilot program aims to shield the campus.

Kingstonian Scott Murray is set to bring a new initiative to campus: the Ugly Umbrella Relay (UUR). The program allows students to share umbrellas across campus, with small stands placed around campus. When it rains, students can grab an umbrella, use it to reach their next building, and then pass it on to someone else, keeping the umbrellas in circulation and making rainy days a little easier for everyone.

While the primary goal behind the campaign is to ensure students remain dry, Murray explained in an interview with The Journal that its other goal is to foster community.

“There will be stands or racks in some of the major buildings, but that’s a fallback position. The way I want it to work is to go from one student to physically hand off to another student; except maybe engineers, I don’t like them,” Murray joked. “It’s important that it be a physical hand off, because you want to get people meeting other people.”

While still ironing out the finer details, such as what buildings the stands will go in and when exactly they will be distributed, he said the plan is to get them out as soon as possible—ideally this week, as rain is forecasted for the next several days.

Murray later explained that he thinks this is the first umbrella sharing initiative of its kind, adding that the idea came to him when he was stuck in a heavy rainstorm in South Carolina. He said people were congregating at the entrance of a Walmart to avoid getting wet, which is when Murray ran to his car and gave his personal umbrella to someone waiting for the rain to pass.

“I just said [to one of the people in the Walmart], take this, when you take your groceries to the car, give it to someone else that’s heading into Walmart. She did that, and it went about five hand-offs until someone stole the umbrella,” Murray said.

Following this experience, he explained he has taken the possibility of theft into consideration when planning this project. He added that he thinks his initial umbrella was stolen because it was a higher-quality umbrella, so he’s purposely bought cheap and “ugly” ones to deter theft.

“The only thing that I can think of [to avoid theft] is the goodwill of the students,” Murray said. “If they want to steal them, they can put me out of business in days, but they’re also saying they don’t want the service.”

He explained that after purchasing of the umbrellas and the materials to build the stands, he’s spent about $500 on the project. In the event of needing to construct new stands or to replace lost, stolen, or damaged umbrellas, Murray said he’s willing to pledge $1,000 a year to the project—adding he’s spent a lot more donating to Queen’s sports, including a $10,500 donation to fund guardian caps for the football team.

While he hasn’t worked out a deal with Queen’s to get this project officially sanctioned on campus, Murray explained he’s going to go through with it himself as “they have 43 million square feet in this campus […]. I probably need about 20 of those square feet.”

With nine stands constructed, Murray hopes to polish the stands up by adding some sand to the bottom of them to make them sturdier. All he needs now is “a day at the beach.”

Tags

project, Ugly Umbrella Relay, Umbrella

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