San Luis students exceed food drive goal
The organizers of a canned food drive to benefit the Yuma Community Food Bank may have seemed very optimistic about how much donated food they would be able to collect.
Students in YouthBuild, a San Luis, Ariz.-based remedial education program, set themselves a goal of bringing in 5,000 pounds of non-perishable food during the 1-1/2-month drive that took place in San Luis beginning March 1.
The most that had been brought in past YouthBuild food drives had been 3,000 pounds of canned or packaged food.
As it happened, the campaign far exceeded the previous record and this year’s goal. In all, the current class of YouthBuild students turned over 6,553 pounds to the food bank on April 21.
“It went very well for us,” said Lillian Gutierrez, a YouthBuild student. “The people of San Luis supported us a lot. We didn’t think it would go nearly so well, but each time we knocked on a door, they gave us some quantity of food. We are very satisfied and very happy.”
Youthbuild is a nationwide program that helps high school dropouts work toward their GED high school equivalency certificates and learn vocational skills. In San Luis, the YouthBuild program is administered by Project PPEP, a Tucson-based nonprofit organization that operates charter high schools and provides vocational training in rural Arizona.
The YouthBuild program requires its participants to perform community service projects. The San Luis students choose to organize annual food drives to help the Yuma Community Food Bank, which provides food not only to about 22,000 people a month but also to other nonprofits that serve people in need, among them Salvation Army, Crossroads Mission, Amberly’s Place and Catholic Community Services.
“I am stunned by the community support, because they helped out a lot,” said Dayanara Falcon, another participant in the most recent food drive.
With a staff of 16 employees of its own, the food bank depends on volunteerism to help it feed the hungry, said Shara Merten, president of the food bank.
“We can’t even begin to measure the importance,” she said. “Financial donations help us to keep the lights on and keep people working, but a big part of what we do is take in food donations.”
Jesse Lopez, coordinator of the San Luis YouthBuild program, said apart from going door to door in San Luis, the students received donations from area businesses and organizations that had collected the food from their employees. One group at the Marine Corps Air Station, for example, alone donated more than 1,000 pounds of the food to the campaign, he said.
The campaign “leaves us with the less that together we can do many things, and that the people support us,” Gutierrez said. “At a lot of the houses (the residents) were already waiting for us with a lot of food for people who need it.”