The road to a successful food drive

The McLean community comes together to provide food for Thanksgiving to the needy

Sam Naemi, Reporter

This year’s food drive, run by the Leadership class, was a great example of the charitable spirit of McLean. The annual food drive consists of individual students’ going out and gathering supplies from their house, persuading relatives to give them supplies, and working for the opportunity to buy more supplies.

The McLean Food Drive lasted from Nov. 18th to the 22nd. All proceeds to the McLean Food Drive go directly to Share of McLean. The Share of McLean has been serving the McLean community for 50 years. The Share of McLean is an all volunteer organization who work hard to serve our community, that there’s no family without food, and that there isn’t any fraud of the system that helps the poor.

Share of McLean supports “[o]ur neighbors in need [that] are economically distressed families and individuals, seniors living on limited pensions (often facing medical issues), impoverished immigrants, and victims of spousal abuse, as well as the homeless” (Share of McLean). They have provided 1,500 families and 4,000 people important supplies.

Donations boxes were located in the front office. The supplies donated consists of non-perishable goods, such as bottled water, canned soups, canned vegetables and fruit, granola bars, nuts, crackers, beef jerky, etc. If you want to help the families of McLean then stock up on these goods and bring them in next year.

“Our goal was to collect 500 non-perishable food items which we knew was a stretch but we wanted a challenge. We ended up collecting around 300 food items which we were happy about,” junior Eliza Bell said.

“This is the first year that McLean has done a food drive since I have been at McLean,” junior Eliza Bell said. While they didn’t meet their exact goal they did make a significant impact on the impact to the families Share of McLean gave the food too. “In the future, we would like to set and achieve a higher goal so that people in need in the McLean community are given access to the food they need, especially during the holiday season,” Leadership teacher Bridget Donoghue said.