Twenty five years of EORC. Ten years of EAGLE. When you’re feeding 200 people at something like that, you could just order pizza and call it done. Nobody would blink. But it would be much more special if we, the EORC staff and our EAGLE students, do it ourself and a few people on the catering side wanted the food to actually mean something, not just fill plates while people mingled.

So the idea came up: spell out EORC, right there in the toppings, across the pizzas everyone would be eating. And what made it worth doing wasn’t the letters themselves, it was what putting them there actually meant. This wasn’t one person’s idea. It took a group of people agreeing this was worth the extra effort, figuring out logistics together, and staying motivated enough to see it through when it would’ve been so much easier to just order the usual and move on.

That’s the part that stuck with us. Feeding 200 people is already a job. Choosing to turn that job into a small statement about the place you work, that takes people who care beyond what’s required of them. Somebody had to bring up the idea in the first place. Somebody had to say yes, let’s actually do this. And then a whole team had to pull together to make it happen on the day, on top of everything else going on.

So when the pizzas hit the tables and people started noticing what they were looking at, what they were really seeing wasn’t clever topping placement. It was a handful of us deciding that even the food at this anniversary should reflect the same thing the institute has run on for 25 years: people showing up for each other, putting in more thought than anyone asked for, and making something work because they wanted it to.

Here’s to whoever brought up the idea, and to everyone who helped pull it off. And here’s to twenty five more years of EORC, hopefully with just as many people still willing to go the extra mile for something as small and as good as this.