Kids Who Care | Teen Ink

Kids Who Care

April 30, 2008
By Anonymous

There was a volunteering program called Kids Who Care in The Greater Boston Food Bank. The Greater Boston Food Bank helps hungry people by providing food. The purpose of this visit was to volunteer and experience how people work. There were five groups of people who volunteered for this job. Our main teacher’s name was Ms. Cooper. She briefly went over what we were going to be doing in the Food Bank. She told us about the food pantry, soup kitchen, different groups of people who were hungry for example children, senior, and the homeless.
First, Ms. Cooper talked about food pantries and soup distribution. There are about 500 food pantries in Massachusetts and 100 soup distributions. That was the ratio of food pantries to soup kitchens. This number showed that food pantries are more popular to people who are volunteering to help the hungry. The reason why food pantries were more popular is because it doesn’t take much effort. Soup distributions were a place where people hand out homemade soups. The Food Pantry is a place where hungry people just pick up food from the building.

Second, our instructor guided us to the room for volunteers. When we were walking there, she told us that about 33 percent of hungry people were children. About 20 percent were senior citizens. The reason why senior citizens are considered hungry at such a high rate is because of homelessness and retirement. The purpose of retiring is to spend the rest of their lives enjoying and doing what they wanted to do. However, with the current economy, it is difficult to live out of pension. The last thing Amy told the volunteers were that the hungry can fit in a space up to three times the size of a Fenway Park
In addition, our job was to separate food products into sixteen different categories. The categories were meal, soup, protein/beans, canned vegetables, etc. There were about thirty packages of food products. They were donated from the Shaws, supermarket. There were ten boxes in each box there were thirty packages. The volunteers worked hard and I felt that I should donate to this Food Bank when I grow up. Because I could understand how difficult it would be to be hunger I did not know how difficult it would be to separate. I realized what hard work was. We calculated that we fed about 23,000 people in two hours. That was an amazing experience in my life.
Lastly, our manager of The Greater Boston Food Bank showed us what their plans were to feed more hungry people. The plan was that they were building another Food Bank at the end of the street. She told the volunteers that it would be open in about ten to twelve months. We each got a pamphlet and a brief introduction of how The Greater Boston Food Bank was doing. They were helping about 190 communities and they fed about four million people a year in MA. Furthermore, with the other building that they were working on, they could feed twice as more people.
In conclusion, I learned a lot from this volunteering work. I worked hard and decided that I should donate some food to these places if I could in the future. It was an exciting and also tiring job to separate foods into sixteen different categories. However, in the end I felt really fresh and happy to think that I had done some activities that helped a lot of people. Also, I thanked my parent about my life and about how I am living right now.


Similar Articles

JOIN THE DISCUSSION

This article has 0 comments.