At the recent “Make Hunger History” Second Harvest Food Bank Awards, Menlo-Atherton High School received two awards. One was the Blue Diamond Award based on direct food donations and financial contributions. Only two other schools won this prestigeous award. It was received alongside companies such as Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Google, among others. The school also won the Community Champion Award, which is awarded to non-corporate groups with the highest point totals.
M-A has won both of these awards every year since joining forces with Second Harvest Food Bank four years ago. Noted an article in M-A BearNotes: “We would like to thank the PTA for all of your support with a very special thank you going out to our co-chairs, Julie Brody and Jill Smith. It was pure joy to work with them. We appreciate the time they contributed, making connections with our grocery stores, organizing a donation of specially made boxes and the wonderful support that they provided. The Leadership class and Kelly Todd are instrumental in the success of this endeavor every year. Thanks to their organizational skills and hard work, M-A makes a difference in the community.”
Menlo-Atherton High School’s Canned Food Drive has officially ended, collecting a grand total of 69,779 cans, surpassing the goal of 65,000 cans.
M-A students went “canning” for about a month, a process in which they stood at grocery stores around the community and asked people to purchase a few cans on their shopping trips. People donated cans as well as money to the drive. M-A also partnered with Second Harvest Food Bank, a Bay Area program that helps provide food to families for the holidays
After collecting the cans, the students brought them back to M-A where they were counted, tracked, and stored.
At the end of the Canned Food Drive, the Ecumenical Hunger Program (EHP) in East Palo Alto hosted Distribution Day, an event in which M-A students and parent volunteers packaged the food. Fresh produce was also provided for families, which came to EHP to receive boxes of food.
This year, M-A helped feed over 400 families in our community. The remaining food went to EHP, so they could help feed more families.
The M-A Leadership class played a big role in both the tracking and distribution aspects of the Canned Food Drive. These dedicated students organized the canning shifts, advertised to the students and community about the event, ensured that all the cans are counted, and ultimately decided how to allocate the food to families on Distribution Day. Without the hard work and planning of these students, the Canned Food Drive would not have been as successful as was.
Search
