Host a Sandwhich Making Party with the Help of 363 Days
Here is a great opportunity to make a difference with a sandwich drive scaled to fit your lifestyle. The Twin Cities-based organization 363 Days makes it simple to host a sandwich making party with a few friends, a troop of scouts, or an entire grade school.
This morning, Miss First Grader asked if she could transform her standing play date with the neighbors into a sandwich making party. Who could say no to that request? In spite of a rather exhausting weekend, I agreed and our neighbors readily signed on (though they are equally stretched thin).
Thanks to 363 and their extremely straight forward instructions, planning the event was incredibly easy. They give you the shopping list, the bagging strategies, and your choice of drop off sites around the metro.
Better yet, they’ve partnered with Corbons Delivers to offer free delivery and a 5% kickback to 363, so if you don’t have time for the shopping trip, you can absolutely eliminate it.
Where will our sandwiches go? We selected a convenient drop off site near us. We’ll drop them off tomorrow. Then, thanks to the efficient organization of 363 Days, our work will be pooled with that of other volunteer groups and distributed to homeless shelters across the metro.
What we gathered:
- Sandwich ingredients according to the 363 mathematics (2 slices of meat and 1 slice of cheese per sandwich)
- Sandwich bags
- Markers
- Hand sanitizer
- Bandanas (to use as hair nets)
As always, I wanted to put as much emphasis on the conversation as on the activity. Doing good next to my kids may be easier at times, but reflecting about the good we’re doing helps it feel more like I’m doing good with the kids.
Thanks to DGT founder Jenny Friedman’s resources, I had the following conversation starters at my fingertips.
Reflection Questions:
- How would you feel if you were hungry and didn’t know when you’d eat next?
- Why do you think some people have to live in homeless shelters?
- What is your favorite lunch food? What is your favorite kind of sandwich?
- How would it feel to never eat food that is warmed up?
- What are other ways to help people who are hungry or homeless?
I also gave the kids a few details about homelessness in their own community, thanks to a 2009 study by the Wilder Foundation.
Homeless Children in Minnesota:
- Each night in Minnesota, nearly 4,000 children under 17 years old are homeless. That is like five of my daughter’s elementary schools full of homeless kids each night!
- Half of those homeless children are under five. That’s like 18 kindergarten classes from my daughter’s school.
- Most of these kids and their families had stable housing in Minnesota before they became homeless.
- Today is something of a heat wave in Minnesota and tonight will only be 33 degrees. By the end of the week, the nightly temperature will be in the teens or even lower.
We talked about homelessness a little. We sang some Christmas carols. We told some jokes. Our group had one four-year-old, one five-year-old, and two six-year-old (not to mention the baby I wore in a sling). The first graders took charge of the event, prodding the younger girls to keep them moving and cheering on the group to make it to 100 sandwiches total.
After an hour, the little sisters washed their hands of the situation and ran off to play, but the big girls persisted. They made 90 sandwiches total in just under an hour and a half. When they finished, they celebrated with a couple of sandwiches of their own.
They were so proud of themselves!
“If only,” they told me, “we could buy the people some houses too. Too bad they cost, like a thousand dollars so we can’t.”
If only. Today we’ll start with lunch.
Tags: Help the Hungry Month, Improving Lives
