When two classes of fourth- and fifth-graders at Cumberland Elementary in Sunnyvale began their food drive, they had no idea that in three short weeks they would collect a whopping 607 pounds of food.
“If you’ve seen a 50-pound kid, it’s like 12 of them, which is pretty funny because we have some 50-pound kids in our class and if you added 12 of them up, then that’s pretty amazing,” said 9-year-old Julia Johnsone.
The 64 students in Nathalie Faure’s and Stacey Rodriquez’s classes were reading “Crenshaw” by Katherine Applegate, a book that details a family’s struggle with poverty and homelessness. A food drive benefiting Sunnyvale Community Services came about from the readings.
The boy in the book “has an imaginary friend and he doesn’t know why he has it. He wants it to go away, but he doesn’t have any friends because he can’t afford to go to school. So his imaginary friend is always there for him,” said Julia.
“There’s a quote, I don’t know who made it, but I think the author did,” said 9-year-old Anabelle Yip. “Jack is the main character [in the book], and his imaginary friend is named Crenshaw. It says, Crenshaw’s imaginary, but childhood hunger isn’t.”
The food drive ran from Oct. 16 to Nov. 6. To get the ball rolling, kids made posters, put out collection boxes around Cumberland and put information in the school’s newsletter. Although they had a bit of class time to work on the food drive, many spent lunch and recess working.
The teachers wanted the students to come up with the idea for a food drive on their own.
“I had read [‘Crenshaw’] and thought it was a really good story to get them thinking about things other than themselves,” said Faure. “We have wanted the kids to be excited to do some kind of service project of sorts, but we kept holding off because we didn’t want to tell them, ‘Oh we’re going to collect food,’ or ‘Oh, we’re going to do that.’ We wanted them to try and come up with ideas themselves.”
Most of the donations came from students raiding their own pantries for supplies, with some urging their parents to take them to the grocery store to pick up more items. They had already collected an admirable amount, but near the end of the food drive the kids were met with a big anonymous donation of food via Google Express. The drive in total netted 566 items for Sunnyvale Community Services.
“They were really thankful for all the food we brought in,” said Julia.
The children were overwhelmed and proud of their accomplishments, but learned that there is still a lot of work to be done to resolve child hunger, not only in the world but in their own community.
“When we were reading the book…I never really thought about anyone having this problem,” said 10-year-old Ashley Freides. “I only thought it was a couple people in a community; I never thought it was a bunch of people in the whole world.”
