We’ve made great progress in overcoming COVID-19, but we still feel its impacts in our daily lives. As we are getting used to going back to our daily pre-pandemic lives, it is easy to forget the lessons we learned throughout the pandemic, like being grateful for what we have. Because of this we wanted to give back to the community again, by setting up a food drive for Diwali, the festival of lights. We created a team of middle and high school students who are part of the Urbana STEMM and EKAL youth program.
Next, if people would donate, we collected food by having them drop off at designated locations or we picked it up from them. Once the day of sending the food to the Frederick Rescue Mission arrived, we contacted Valerie (Program manager at FRM), gathered all the donations, and drove them to their location in Frederick, MD (https://www.therescuemission.org). We are very grateful to the Villages of Urbana community residents for their generous donation and supporting our efforts.
We learned a lot of things, the most important is the importance of giving because this helps uplift our community so that everyone has an equal chance regardless of their background. We also learned valuable lessons about teamwork and leadership, as we all managed different aspects of the food drive.