Harvest Festival Food Bank
This year, we celebrated the annual harvest by raising awareness of what the act of giving means to those of different faiths and nationalities.
What did we do?
We started small. Every year the Chaplaincy Service runs a Harvest festival, and we approached them to work together collecting food for the local food bank. Food banks provide a safety net for people suffering financial hardship, whether a long time member of the local community or a student who has been here a month. We’re a massive university in quite a small town, and sometimes people can get the wrong idea about students, so we wanted to set the record straight. We put faith in our students’ generosity and community spirit, and they didn’t let us down!
We could have made a big song and dance with targets for how much food we wanted to collect and all the rest of it, but instead, we just put out collection baskets in our SU spaces across all campuses, explained what they were for, and put our faith in students to want to help. And help they did! Two black bags of food later, Mishan was singing his heart out at the Harvest Festival with all of the food students had donated.
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What did we do next?
It went so well that we decided to take it a step further. Turkey and sumo costumes at the ready, we gathered some willing participants and headed out for some Halloween Trick or Treating with a twist. Despite the fact that the weather was like something out of Jurassic Park,
our merry band of trick or treaters soldiered on and we came back with a massive trolley full of tinned goods for the local food bank
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What are we still doing?
Both of our food drives worked really well, but why stop there? We’ve decided to keep food collection points in all of our SU spaces across campuses, and any food collected will be donated to the food bank nearest each of our campuses. We were blown away by the generosity of students, and when we explained to people living in the local community what we were doing out Trick or Treating at our age, so were they.
So if you’ve got any food sitting in the back of your cupboard that you can’t bear to look at any more, bring it into us, because your little bag of pasta can make a big difference.
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