Add Meaning to your School Food Drive
Food drives sprout up at schools periodically throughout the year, offering the opportunity to cram one more thing in your child’s back pack or make one more stop to drop a box off at the front office. Or, of course, spend time reflecting with your child about the collective good works of his or her peers.
When my daughter’s school sent the flier home, it was tempting to add this to my long list of “to do’s” and simply drop off the box I keep near our door for the food shelf items we routinely pick up on shopping trips.
So often I’m tempted to do good near the kids rather than with them. So often it seems like such an extra effort to engage them with big ideas. Of course, being a believer in the Doing Good Together philosophy, I resist the urge… most of the time.
Instead of tucking the flier into my planner, Miss Kindergarten and I had the conversation. She’s been to the food shelf with me enough times to know the story. The food shelf helps people right in our own community when the run out of money for groceries.
This time she asked why.”Why don’t they have enough money for groceries?”
What a complicated question! How tempting it is to launch into the distressing socioeconomic milieu that has depressed real wage levels since the 1970s or to cite the recently unveiled report by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which traced the complicated layers of human inaction and devious action that led us to the current jobless swamp.
Reminding myself again that she is five, I focused on a different word in her question. Not the why but the they.
We talked about how lucky our family is to have work that gives us enough money plus a little extra. We talked about how easily we could have an unlucky month or six or twelve. I told her how that would make me feel, and asked how she might feel if we didn’t have enough money to buy all of our groceries.
“I’d be very happy that we could go to the food shelf,” was her immediate answer. What a segue. She grabbed the food drive flier from her school and started hunting down words she knew: soup, sugar, flour, ketchup, beans, pasta.
Her next half hour was spent shopping in our pantry for anything she could find from the list. The next day, she hauled a heavy backpack into the bus, and she returned home excited. She was full of stories of the huge box she and her classmates filled up for the food shelf.
Tags: Building Community, Improving Lives
