Crystal Medrano
EDITOR-iN- CHIEF
For a record of eight years, the Community Based Learning office has been feeding less fortunate families for the Thanksgiving Holiday. Individuals and groups from the Dominican Community can sign up to provide a Thanksgiving basket for a family in need.
Community Based Learning is a program that can be attached to classes requiring students to get involved in their community while learning skills related to the class. The Thanksgiving Food drive is an annual event the CBL program hosts to allow the community to share it’s love and service with others.
The baskets provide the families with all the necessary essentials for a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. This mainly includes cans of fruit, veggies and soup, boxes of stuffing, rice, gravy mix, dinner rolls, and a gift card to allow the family to buy a turkey. In it’s history, this program started with 35 families and has now grown to help feed 85 families with each family including two to eight people.
This year, Junior Student Coordinator for CBL Laila Mitchel enrolled in a class with CBL. She decided to give this event more versatility by expanding in order to increase student involvement.
Mitchel has been helping out with the Thanksgiving food drive for the past four years. The basket food drive requires individuals to come up with the needs for the entire basket. She realized that most of the baskets provided were due to faculty efforts and wanted to find a way to get more students to contribute.
Mitchel’s CAS 320 class required students to come up with a project and given her knowledge and history with this program, she decided to expand it. Mitchel has attached to this program, a regular non-perishable items food drive. This will allow students to give as much or as little as they can at their own leisure with no strings attached. The items given will be dispersed amongst the baskets.
All donations are then taken to St. Josephs Services to be given to their respective families. This allows them to have a dinner and family experience that they might not have been able to experience otherwise.
Mitchel said, “This project is one of my proudest accomplishments because it’s something tangible that you can see is actually helping people. Seeing your months long work come into action is so satisfying.”
The Thanksgiving basket collection and food drive started on Nov 7. The last day to provide goods will be on Nov.17.
Students wishing to help out with this should go to the CBL before this date. If you would like to contribute to the food drive, a Turkey Box is located outside the CBL office in the Lewis Link. c
medrcrys@my.dom.edu