More than 20-colleges, high schools and middle schools have pledged their support to collect food for the homeless. The Buffalo City Mission kicked-off Mission Possible: Food Drive School Challenge Thursday. The challenge encourages students to collect more than 72,000 canned goods. City Mission Executive Director Stuart Harper said the challenge will engage students in learning about the link between hunger and poverty.
“I think they make the mission less scary, a scary place. From the outside you don’t know what’s happening in there, you don’t know who’s coming there. Once they get involved in this they start realizing that the men that come here and the women that come to Corner Stone are moms and dads and kids,” Harper remarks. The food drives allow students access to the work of the City Mission and helps break down barriers in the community.
Harper tells WBFO News this is a 'first of a kind' event by the organization to help serve the homeless.
“It’s a combination of different things we’ve been thinking about wanting to do. We need to raise the food for our Thanksgiving and Christmas outreach,” said Harper. Collectively, the City Mission plans to serve “about ten thousand meals out to the community on Thanksgiving morning and Christmas morning,” he added.
The community project has a bigger goal, too. Harper explains: “But also, we wanted to be able to educate people about what we do at the mission but also about the bigger challenge we have in this region which is poverty.”
Students participating have 12-weeks to collect all the canned goods and the winning schools will receive a trophy. The collected canned goods will be used during the holidays to serve up more than 10,000 meals at the City Mission. The schools are from the north and south towns as well as Buffalo's inner city. WBFO News spoke with some Clarence Middle School students about why they are joining the effort.
“We’re going to advertise the drive and make it part of the school to make sure we can help support those in need,” one student told WBFO.
“It’s kind of sad just to think about it and you really appreciate how much that you have,” another added. The students closed with a positive message. “At the end of this we just can say that we helped end world hunger and we can end this and make everybody happy.”
Students from the Pembroke Central School District in Corfu are also participating. Greg Kinal is a social studies teacher at Pembroke Junior Senior High School who teaches a college sociology class and for years he and his students have been volunteering at the City Mission, bringing donations and working at the center in downtown Buffalo. Kinal told WBFO about the work his students have been doing for the Mission.
“So we’ve washed every wall there is in this place and to talk about our canned good drive and you’re talking about how many canned goods we can raise I’ve now latched on to one of my colleagues in the intermediate school. We have three schools in the Pembroke district, and he is at the intermediate school, grades three through six. Last year in three months he had a goal of raising 1,000 cans of food and more than met it,” Kinal commented.
Kinal said they started volunteering back in 1992 and continue to this day. He told WBFO, “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve pulled in here with a 72-passenger school bus and it took almost 30-minutes to unload it here.”
