Marian Central Catholic High School, Food Fight

Marian Central Catholic High School, Woodstock, IL
Project: Food Fight
Adviser: Dr. Glenn Pinnau

People tend to feel most generous during the holidays, giving their time and extra change to charities and soup kitchens. Unfortunately, the need for food and other necessities continues year-round, especially with the recent downturn of the economy.

In March 2009, Marian Central Catholic High School's Bishop Lane chapter of National Honor Society was called upon to meet this need in a local food pantry. Adviser Dr. Glenn Pinnau received a call from Deacon Hans Rokus at a local parish, notifying him of the empty shelves in area food pantries. Deacon Rokus had heard of the chapter’s past successful projects and thus saw fit to call upon them. Chapter officers, eager to serve the needs of the community, immediately met to discuss how to make the canned food drive as successful as possible.

The officers recognized that the success of this project greatly depended on the participation of the student body, who would be asked to donate food to the drive. As the school requires its students to wear uniforms, out-of-uniform days are usually effective incentives to participate in the project. They concluded that a competition with the reward of a dress-down day would make for a successful project. This conclusion led to the development of the "Food Fight," a competition among the English classes to collect the most cans for the drive.

Within a school week of being notified of the need for food in our community, the chapter had begun advertising for a "Food Fight" that would take place the following week. Officers and members were divided into committees that were each responsible for one or two aspects of the project. The advertising committee created posters and wrote announcements to be read over the school intercom. The communication committee contacted the Woodstock Food Pantry to determine which items were most needed and organize the drop-off, collaborated with the school administration to ensure that everything would run smoothly, and wrote memos to the English teachers to enlist their support and notify them of the details of the drive. An operations committee was responsible for placing bins in each of the English classrooms, and collecting and counting the cans each day of the competition.

Finally, on a Friday afternoon, the drive came to a close, and it was time to count the cans. Most of the members stayed after school to help, but the task was so huge that it took several hours and the help of over a dozen non-member students to sort, count, and package all of the food.

When all was said and done, more than 6,000 food items had been collected to donate to the pantry. Before they could celebrate this success, however, they encountered a problem: the Woodstock food pantry did not have enough storage space to accommodate all of the food. But too much food was a good problem. It meant they had an opportunity to donate to another local food pantry, the Boone County Food Pantry, whose managers were only too happy to take the extra food off their hands.

The Marian Central Catholic High School chapter of National Honor Society could not have been more pleased with the outcome of this opportunity to meet the needs of the community. They were extremely impressed with and grateful for the participation and support of the student body and faculty. The worth of the project cannot be determined simply by the number of cans collected or the effective collaboration and coordination necessary to make it successful, but rather by the impact that their efforts made on the food pantry coordinators and their clients.

Nothing can outweigh the tear-filled eyes of the food pantry coordinator at the sight of three cars full of food, just as her stores were being depleted. The appreciative disposition of the elderly man at the Woodstock food pantry who readily supplied smiles lightened the loads of food as they were carried into the basement and made this work worth every minute. Even more so, the faces of the parents carrying the collected goods home to their families helped chapter members fully realize the importance and reason behind their hard work.