CF wraps up food drive with over 18,000 pounds

By: Sarah Stortz

The CFHS annual food drive has finally come to an end with the results of 18,674 pounds of food being provided by our own staff and student body. All of the food collected will be sent to the Northeast Iowa Food Bank to help feed over 22,000 families in need.

The food bank was able to receive 34,346 pounds of food total from all the schools competing against each other. Cedar Falls High School collected around 54 percent of the food and gained 1st place in the food drive competition, winning $1,000 in doing so.

Guidance Counselor Erin Gardner, who helps run student senate, said she was more than satisfied with how much food was collected. “I think we did awesome,” she said. “We collected lots of peanut butter, lots of fruit and lots of cans of meat, which are things that are necessities. People can get food like cans of green beans and corn at the store, but that won’t necessarily fill them up, so they need things that have more protein and are a little more expensive at the store. We’ll be able to provide the families with those kinds of food.”

Gardner said she believes that we got as many pounds of food as we did because of how much we worked hard on promoting it. “It just wasn’t the high school. It was all of us working together,” she said. “We were able to get all of the schools in our district to help us, and we are so thankful.”

Even with the strong lead in the contest, Cedar Falls High school didn’t manage to reach the 20,000 pound goal originally planned. Nonetheless, the school is planning to extend the goal to an even larger  number for next year’s food drive in order to collect those 20,000 pounds of food.

Shortly before the end of the food drive, student senate had its own event where members went door-to-door in their neighborhoods on Halloween to trick-or-treat for food cans to help add to the CFHS collection. Senior Drew Stensland was one of the participants of the trick-or-treating event and said, “The results seemed very encouraging. Although we weren’t able to reach our goal of 20,000 pounds of food, it was still a huge outpouring of support from the community.”

Stensland also made a point on why this food drive was so important for us to participate in. “People all over our community go hungry every day, and we have to work to make sure these people get the food they so desperately need,” Stensland said. “Some people don’t realize how important it is. The people who use the Food Bank could be your neighbor or a friend of yours from school. It isn’t just an issue somewhere else. It is an issue that we need to confront, and one that we have helped to confront with our work on the food drive .“

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