Holmen Middle School annual Holiday food drive By: Chelsy DeLaney & Jeri DeLaney

Summary Of Event This was the third annual Holmen Middle School food drive for hunger. Each year our school holds this event for two weeks right before the Thanksgiving Break. We have a contest for each advisory to collect as much food as they can and on the day before break we have an assembly that recognizes the winning advisory from each grade those students get to duck tape and put pies in our principle and associate principles face. The students love this! The food is then sent home with Holmen Middle School families in need and donated to a local food pantry for others in this area.

Collaboration For this service learning project, we (Jeri & Chelsy) collaborated together as we both work at HMS and thought this would be a great fundraiser to get involved with. We had the opportunity to work with about 10 other HMS staff members throughout this project, including our associate principle, guidance counselors, and other great staff members. We also had the opportunity to work with 46 local businesses that were willing to help out with products, labor, donations, and monetary donations. Local Holmen families and the local food pantry were also involved with this fundraiser.

Problems This service learning project was fantastic and we feel honored to be part of such an amazing fundraiser that truly helps the people we know and love in our Holmen area. This year was the first year we were directly involved other than donating our selves. We were able to help with going out and getting businesses to donate and also with the distribution and organizing of the food itself. We were fortunate to really not encounter many issues, other than at times some businesses were not willing to help out in any way, this was a bit disappointing but understandable. Also when we completed this yesterday, it was a ton of work organizing, separating, counting, and distributing the food to families, and the pantry, we ran short on labor, boxes, and just man power, we could have used more volunteers to help with this. I also think we could have and maybe should have done this earlier rather than the last day before break at school. It would have cut down the stress on the volunteers. We solved this by just working through it, and working a few more hours, we also called Festival foods and they donated some boxes to help with distributing the food.

Active listening skills Active listening and communication skills were key to pulling this fundraiser off, from all parties involved. We know that we used listening when attending the prior planning meetings, when we went out to local businesses, we also listened to the food pantry and families who were in need, letting us know what important items, and things we really were in need of this holiday season. We communicated those needs to the HMS students and their families and received a ton of support from them. Without listening to our community, students, families, and local businesses we would not have had the success we did.

Our reflection As it was both of our first times really being involved from start to finish, really hands on with a service learning project or in this case a food drive fundraiser; we really did not know what to expect or how to go about it. Which is why we choose to get involved with the HMS food drive, we felt this was going to work the best with our busy schedules and give us the guidance we desired as we were new to this. It was great! We worked with some of the best co-workers we could ask for, it gave us both a chance to work with some of the staff we don’t normally get a chance to; we have made some great friends from this experience. We also had the opportunity to help out our area, and it feels great, especially this time of year. Their were so many benefits to this, friendships made, helping families, reaching out and getting support from our community, helping our HMS students see and do something about a need in our area, and having success to top it off. We have both decided we will be a part of this again next year and for years to come.

Artifacts Our HMS families, students, staff, and communit y have donated over 7, 250 food items for those in need this holiday season.

Artifacts

Duck taping our Principle Mr. Vogler to the wall. Pre-paring, to pie our associate principle Mrs. Holter in the face. Mrs. Holter’s pie face!

Scoring Guide