The Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) hosted their ninth annual Give a Little, Feed a Lot food drive on Saturday, September 16. Starting at about 9:30 a.m., student volunteers began showing up on the Green Space for registration. Students received t-shirts and were assigned teams before they boarded school buses that brought them to various neighborhoods around Manchester.
Each team was given a shopping cart and a route to walk and collect any non-perishable food items donated by Manchester residents. Donated items were left in paper bags marked with orange labels in front of participating residents’ homes. When students’ carts were full, they were taken to one of several drop off locations where more volunteers waited to transport the collected goods back to SNHU.
Upon returning back to SNHU, volunteers were rewarded with BBQ served on the Green Space as well as the sight of the incredible amount of food they gathered being loaded onto trucks for donation to the New Hampshire Food Bank. Thanks to the hard work and collaboration of SNHU volunteers and the generosity of residents of the North End of Manchester, the event resulted in a record breaking collection of food.
“GALFAL was an enormous success this year with over 130 volunteers,” said Kelly Hobbs, associate director of CCEL. “It was so successful we collected 8,680 pounds of food. That beats our SNHU record set in 2010 when we collected 8,390. Over the past 9 years we’ve collected a total of 60,298 pounds. It was so great to see the many different faculty and staff members, students and teams out there on Saturday.”
Despite this record breaking year, Elizabeth Richards, Director of the CCEL, has even bigger hopes for next year. “We’re so excited that next year is our tenth food drive. We have big plans to make it bigger than ever- our goal is to reach 10,000 pounds in honor of the tenth anniversary of this SNHU tradition,” said Richards.
Elle Tibbitts, also from the CCEL, was pleased with the turnout of the event. “It was an incredible finale! After three years of organizing the annual Give a Little, Feed a Lot food drive, to end with 134 volunteers and enough food to fill two trucks was an amazing feeling,” said Tibbitts.
