TYNE VALLEY, P.E.I. — Students from Évangéline School in Abram-Village recently collected and contributed 749 non-perishable food items, weighing 295.33 kilograms and worth $1,683.38, to the Tyne Valley Caring Cupboard (TVCC) food bank to help families in need.
"You have no idea how these 16 large boxes of food are a boon to us,” said Doug LeBlanc, one of the co-ordinators of the TVCC.
The number of people asking for food is increasing at this time of year as many seasonal workers and unemployed people are having difficulty feeding their families due to financial hardships, said the other co-ordinator, Verna Barlow.
She reported that in the first six months of the year, 196 local families had requested food assistance. Barlow expects the figure for the last six months of 2019 may well exceed this number.
The annual school food drive took place during Co-op and Small Business Weeks, at the invitation of the Évangéline-Central Credit Union and various other co-operative and community partners.
Claudine Blaquière’s high school geopolitical class co-ordinated the collection at the school. Students could bring food items from home or they could contribute food as a cost of participating in fun theme days organized for this purpose – pajama days and hat days. On the two Wednesdays of the collection period, intermediate and high school students who contributed food received a ticket for a draw in the school cafeteria.
Maude Bertrand's Grade 5 class, 14 students, collected 95 of the items, giving them the highest contribution ratio – an average of 6.7 items per person. The class won $100 from the Évangéline-Central Credit Union.
The geopolitics class sorted all the contributions and placed them on the Caring Cupboard shelves. The students also sorted through the 134 items, valued at $762.37, from a collection at Ellerslie Elementary School, which was also co-ordinated by the credit union.
