Big-hearted pupils in food bank drive

Volunteers at Rutherglen and Cambuslang Food Bank have been left “staggered” by the hard work and generosity of local children aged just six and seven years old.

Pupils of Bankhead Primary School collected a wealth of food for the charity after learning about world hunger in their religious and moral education programme.

Keen to help the people they had been learning about, the P2/3 class children decided to launch a food drive throughout the school for Rutherglen and Cambuslang Foodbank.

They invited a member of the organisation to talk to them about their work.

Armed with this new information, they decided what the school should focus on collecting and divided the main food items between the classes throughout the rest of the school. And when the donations were collected on Friday, the P2/3 class sorted them and bagged them before they were collected by the food bank to be taken to their warehouse and distributed to local families.

Ian Robertson, treasurer of the food bank, said he was overwhelmed by the children’s enthusiasm.

He said: “I was impressed by the maturity and perceptive nature of the children’s approach to the issue and the questions they asked in class.

“A month later I dropped in to collect the food the children had collected and I was staggered – literally – by the quantity of food they had.

“With the back seats down and the front passenger seat and footwell filled, the car was packed from floor to roof with their donations.”