Community Corner
Campbell Hall Kids Help Feed the Hungry
Third-graders collect and bag donations for the North Hollywood Interfaith Food Pantry.
On a blazingly sunny afternoon last week, in the parking lot of , about 30 third-graders from set about packing 100 food bags for the North Hollywood Interfaith Food Pantry, a charity Patch has reported on many .
This day was the culmination of a weeklong, schoolwide food drive, during which the kids collected nearly 800 pounds of groceries.
The students were from the school's Roots and Shoots troop, the Earth Savers.
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“We’ve done a food drive every year,” said Jan Weiss, co-leader of the Earth Savers. “Our group…started in first grade. So this group of 8- and 9-year-olds have been very busy the last three years.”
Roots and Shoots is the youth program of the Jane Goodall Institute, with thousands of members all over the world. The organization is devoted to doing community service, preserving the environment and learning about animals.
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The dedicated activists in the Earth Savers troop participate every week in a project designed to make the world a better place. They visit with and sing to seniors, and raise funds for projects like Shane’s Inspiration and their sister school in Haiti.
“We went to Channel Islands once,” said 9-year-old Maya. “We slept in a museum another time, and this lady came and she showed us animals another time.”
Weiss also described the troop’s latest project: collecting bottle caps from plastic bottles. They’ve been learning how birds and fish mistake those caps for food and die after ingesting them.
To prevent them ending up in the ocean, Earth Savers have been turning in bags of caps every month with the goal of collecting 10,000 of them. The caps will be used to create a big mural and other art projects with the remainder being sent to a special recycler. It turns out that bottles and caps are made from different types of plastic. When bottles are tossed into the blue bin with the caps on, they’re likely to be discarded as trash.
“We actually attended the Roots and Shoots Day of Peace last year and won an award for all of the things that our troop has done,” Weiss said.
The kids interviewed in the accompanying video tell Patch all about the pantry project and their work with Roots and Shoots.
