Five thousand cots that have been used by students who attended InterVarsity’s triennial Urbana Student Mission Conventions at the University of Illinois will find new uses as they are turned over to the Red Cross and the Salvation Army for disaster relief.
The cots were only used at three year intervals, between Christmas and New Years Day. When 20,000 delegates came to the Urbana convention to learn about global missions they maxed out the dormitory facilities of the Urbana-Champaign campus as well as the area’s hotels and motels. But now that InterVarsity has decided to move its 2006 Urbana Convention to St. Louis, the cots will no longer be necessary and the University of Illinois can reclaim its storage space.
About 600 of the cots are going to the Red Cross in Champaign-Urbana and Chicago. A truck from Chicago picked up the first load of 144 cots at the UIUC warehouse on Wednesday, September 28th.
The remainder of the cots, about 4500 in all, will go to the Salvation Army in Springfield, IL.
