Editor’s note: This is the second story in an online article series in cooperation with Gray Elementary teacher Mary Messer and her students. The article series focusses on the students and projects to give back and support their community as they navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic
It’s hard to imagine that there's hunger in our community. That's why we decided to fundraise for Starfish Packs.
Starfish Packs is a program that fills backpacks for children on the weekends. So far in North Delta they fill 65 backpacks in a total of nine schools.
We started this project mid-January thinking it would not get anywhere considering there was the COVID-19 pandemic and we would not be able to help pack the backpacks in a safe condition.
For our fundraising we decided to make and package soaps.
We sold our soaps to Kiera’s mom’s work friends and each package of soaps were sold for a minimum of $5 donations and included four soaps. From our project we made a total of $174 by selling 36 packages of our handmade soaps.
We chose this project because we can’t imagine not having any food on the weekends to eat. My mom once told me her work was getting donations for something called Backpack Buddies (very similar to Starfish Packs).
I asked her why the parents didn’t just buy food for the kids on the weekends and she said that the parents might not have enough money to buy the food and that they rely on the school system to get food on weekdays.
I decided to join her because I wanted to do a project that impacted children because I'm an only child but I have three cousins who I think are amazing and I would be so sad if they didn’t have food on the weekends.
Do you want to get involved with your community? All it takes is a small action, because even that can make a big impact.
