FFA sponsors 10th food drive in Nelson County

Students and faculty from Nelson County High School recently collected $1,130.35 for several needy families and 3,840 nonperishable food items for the Nelson County Food Pantry through the “Cans & Coins for Kids” drive.

“The drive went well,” said Ed, McCann, the FFA advisor. “Considering the state of the economy I think it did very well.”

This was the tenth year the collection has been held at the high school. It is sponsored by the Future Farmers of America chapter at the school. The collection ran from Monday, Nov. 28, through Friday, Dec. 2.

Students brought the money and food to their first block class throughout the week. During the second block, students in the agricultural class would collect and tally the amounts each class collected. Only three classes did not participate in the collection.

The club encouraged a large collection by turning the drive into a competition between the first block classes. The 84 FFA members provided a breakfast of pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, sausage gravy on biscuits, fruit salad and doughnuts to the class that collected the most.

The breakfast was paid for with money from various fund raisers the club held throughout the fall, McCann said.

“The FFA has always done some type of food drive during the fall holiday season to help the less fortunate,” McCann said. “The idea for the drive came ten years ago when President George Bush challenged American school children to bring in coins for an Afghan children’s fund. It has become a tradition each year to help local children with the money raised.”

Emma Saunders, the chapter reporter, wrote in a letter to the paper, that one of the reasons the students did the collection was because they found out a child in the county didn’t have his or her own pair of shoes and the students wanted to help.

The food was delivered to the food pantry last Friday.

November and December are the busiest months for the food pantry. Last December the food pantry gave out 23,750 pounds of food, including 5,625 pounds of donated food.

The high school collected about 1,200 pounds of food, or nearly 25 percent of the donations last year, said Marian Dixon, the vice president of the Nelson County Food Pantry board.

Last year the pantry distributed food to 270 households, but Dixon said she has received a lot of people requesting to be added to the distribution and predicts about 300 households this year.

Food pantry volunteers provide certain items each month including cereal, rice, baked goods and canned fruit and vegetables, which they often buy for their clients. Dixon said the donations are often things the clients would not normally get like coffee, boxed tea and Ramen noodles.

“This is the only way people get different things,” Dixon said. “All of our collections are important. Every food item we get is important.”