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ODSS students collect over 3,000 lbs of donations for Orangeville Food Bank

November 17, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Brian Lockhart

With the rising cost of food, more families and individuals than ever before are reaching out to food banks for help putting groceries in their cupboards.

Food banks across the country are reporting a marked increase in people registering and hoping to supplement their food needs.

Students in the Grade 11 Leadership Class at Orangeville District Secondary School again rose to the challenge and collected more than 3,000 lbs of non-perishable food items for the Orangeville Food Bank.

“The Leadership Class takes on initiatives that are school-wide or community-wide, specifically this Leadership Class has more to do with community initiatives so we’ll do things like the toy drive with the Salvation Army, the food drive in the fall, and the Coldest Night of Year in February,” explained Leadership Class teacher, Corin Mercey. “The class is open to everybody so I have a huge range of students.”

For the past couple of years, the students had to change their method of collecting food due to pandemic restrictions.

“We had to find another way to collect donations,” she explained. “We delivered our own flyers out to the community and the kids did it on their own time and we did it as a class as well, and they went out and picked up food from the porches.”

This year things were back to a more normal operation but the methods used were similar. 

“This year we did the same thing,” Ms. Mercey said. “Each kid creates their own letter and I print them off for them. On their own time, they’ll go home and deliver them on their streets and neighbourhood. We also did it as a class. One day we all went out and delivered them to streets around the school. We put a specific date that we will be coming around. We had the food manager of the [Orangeville] Food Bank come into the class to give a presentation. We started doing it in mid-September and our last day was October 19.”

The Leadership class is now looking forward to their next project which is working with and fundraising for The Coldest Night of the Year, a nationwide initiative.

The Coldest Night of the Year raises funds for shelters and food banks.

It is held in mid-February to help people understand what it is like to be on the streets on a cold night with nowhere to go.

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