Paraparaumu College students give donations to Kāpiti Community Foodbank

Paraparaumu College students Michael O'Sullivan (left), Luke Denton, Jonny Bertham, Kapiti Community Foodbank volunteers Brian Geary and Tom Bruynel, Taylor Love, Paige Cranshaw, Annabelle Green, with part of a collection for the foodbank. Absent Jessica Nixon. Photo / David Haxton

A group of seven Paraparaumu College students wanted to make a difference in the community, so they decided to gather donations for the Kāpiti Community Foodbank.

The students had to do an achievement standard for their Year 13 food and nutrition class on food poverty where they had to make an action plan on how they could help.

The group was made up of Michael O’Sullivan, Luke Denton, Jonny Bertham, Taylor Love, Paige Cranshaw, Annabelle Green, and Jessica Nixon.

They started their assignment with a day of work experience each, at various food charity groups such as the Kāpiti Community Foodbank and Kaibosh.

Two of the students, Love and Cranshaw, chose to volunteer at the Kāpiti Community Foodbank, and they saw there was an obvious need.

So, the two got together with the rest of their class, and they organised their action plan, which would consist of a mufti-day where students from around the college could choose to either donate a can of food or a $2 coin.

The mufti-day was held last Monday, and the students’ teacher Dionne Ross said they ended up raising $924 and five boxes of food.

That same afternoon, Ross took Love and Cranshaw to Pak’nSave Kāpiti where they purchased additional products for the foodbank using the proceeds of the mufti day.

Love and Cranshaw used their work experience at the Kāpiti Community Foodbank to choose products that they knew were needed.

“There’s a lot of shortages in things like shampoos and toiletries and stuff like that, so there was a big focus on those types of things,” Ross said.

Ross said she was extremely proud of the students, and that they “did a huge amount of work in promoting [the mufti-day]”.

On the Tuesday following the mufti-day, two Kāpiti Community Foodbank volunteers, Brian Geary and Tom Bruynel, brought their van over to Paraparaumu College to pick up the donations.

When the two saw the number of products the students had to donate, Geary joked, “We should have brought a bigger truck”.

Geary said the donations would certainly help, and that their statistics were quite high at the moment.

“We’ve probably fed about 1182 people so far in the last figures worth.”

Of those numbers, he said about 800 of them were children.

“There is poverty here.”