Every year, the BSM freshman class participates in a food drive to help support the non-profit organization PRISM. My class’s service night took place on Friday, October 3. This is a night that every freshman looks forward to for a number of reasons. By taking part in this food drive, we get to give back to the community and take on an issue that is evident all over the world: poverty.
Just in America, there are over 30 million people living in poverty, over 10 million being children. This is just one of the facts we learned during our religion class from a speaker from PRISM who came in to inform our freshman class about the issues surrounding us. After hearing what she had to say and learning about what PRISM was doing to help, everyone was motivated to do our part in helping the community.
On Friday we came to school at 6:00 p.m. and searched through the crowd of anxious students to find our group assigned to us for the food drive. We then drove to a neighborhood of our choice and went door to door collecting food and other household items that we could donate to PRISM. We appreciated any donation given, and it was really cool to see communities start to come together to support others. Even in the freezing cold, my group was in very high spirits as we walked from house to house collecting food, and we took away a lot of fond memories from that night. We not only ended up gathering a very generous amount of food, but we also ended up saving a life (A kitten ran out of a house when we went to the door, and I went after it and brought it back. I say that that counts). (: I also ended up learning things about my friends that I had never known before, like that one of my friend’s voices gets really high when he talks to adults. Hahahaha.
After two hours, 8:00 p.m. arrived, and before anyone knew it, it was time to head back to BSM. No one wanted to go, and we wished that we could have more time to help contribute what we could to PRISM. In the end, my class as a whole ended up collecting over 3,000 pounds of food! That’s enough food to stock PRISM for a whole week. I felt great knowing that we were helping people deal with poverty and hopefully they could overcome it for good.
Our class’s great success during the food drive came as no surprise. In junior high at BSM, we had had many other experiences to help the community. For one day different groups went to various places in the area and cleaned up that location. We filled up tons of garbage bags, and I could see the difference after we were done. Also in junior high, a group of students raised money for children in Darfur. In eighth grade there is a class called Global Topics Social Justice in which you learn about many injustices and issues around the world and what you can do. One topic we greatly touched upon was genocide, and this definitely motivated our class to do something about it.
I am proud to be part of a community that is so dedicated to service. I’ve obtained so many values from taking part in all of these activities, and it’s definitely made me a better person. Being part of the BSM community, I strongly believe that little by little we can make the world a better place.
