‘It’s just really heartwarming’

Local students rake to aid Danbury’s Daily Bread Food Pantry

During a pandemic in which the need for sufficient food has spiked at times in the community, a group of students joined up to rake together a substantial donation for a local food pantry.

The group of students — who named their team BOAR, an acronym representing the first initials of some of the people involved — devoted multiple weekends this fall to raking leaves and cleaning up yards to raise money for Danbury’s Daily Bread Food Pantry. With an added contribution from a company with ties to a family involved, their efforts resulted in over $2,000 getting raised for the pantry, according to the pantry board’s former president, Debbie Landzberg.

After a Rake n Bake event that he had been involved with before was canceled, Brookfield High

School sophomore Omkar Maralappanavar said he and his friends still wanted to find a way to help out. Keeping in step with the raking aspect of the event, they decided to start out by tidying up residents’ properties in the greater Danbury area to gather money

“Hopefully, it will really resonate with the community that, ‘Hey, if these young folks can do this, we can step up too.’ ”

Debbie Landzberg, former president of Danbury’s Daily Bread Food Pantry

for the pantry.

The group dropped off its contribution on Nov. 21. BOAR is composed of Bhuvan Hospet, a Masuk High School freshman; Maralappanavar; Arya Nadgouda, a Guilford High School sophomore; Richa Rao, an Academy of Information Technology and Engineering junior; and Kripa Rao, a Dolan Middle School seventh grader.

The group generally would work away at the houses together. All in all, Nadgouda estimated they’d cleaned up at about 20 houses, with the whole team tackling the smaller properties in about two hours and the larger ones in four to five hours.

Maralappanavar said he saw “a lot of people” at the pantry when he visited there during the summer. After hearing about the

pantry’s efforts from him and seeing the effects other volunteer work they’ve been a part of has had, that made some of them want to get involved as well, Nadgouda said.

“I think we got to like see firsthand what our efforts would be going to and like the impact it would make,” said Hospet, 14, “because we got to see the shelves at the food pantry, we got to see how they operated and how busy they would be normally.”

Richa Rao, 16, also noted the effects that additional, pandemic- related barriers to food access have had.

“The pandemic has caused so many people to lose their jobs, and so many children that would have gotten their meals at school are no longer getting them or are getting them every other day … I think that’s a huge factor in what drove us to really push and form this group, of course, with other factors as well,” she said.

The food pantry — one of the organizations that makes up the Danbury Food Collaborative — is currently open two days per week, Tuesday and Friday.

Landzberg estimated the amount of families coming by on one of the distribution days per week “bottomed out” in the summer between 120 to 140, an amount that she said has recently been closer to about 150 to 170 families.

Just before Thanksgiving, that amount was even higher, Landzberg said, approximating there were about 200 to 230 families coming by on just one of the distribution days. And with the pantry’s food expenses between an estimated $ 1,500 to $4,000 per week during the pandemic, the group’s donation will really help them out, she said.

“Hopefully, it will really resonate with the community that, ‘ Hey, if these young folks can do this, we can step up too,’ ” she said. “In the end, It wasn’t just writing a check, it was really dedicating so many hours of their time on, for two months running, on their weekends to make this happen. All of the money going directly to the pantry, it’s just really heartwarming.”