St. Scholastica's Spring Community Day Focuses on Feeding the Hungry Locally and Globally, as Well as Lobbying at State Capitol

Release Date: 02/24/12

The College of St. Scholastica's Community Day on Wednesday, Feb. 29, will involve students delivering 2,000 free 'Thanksgiving in the Spring' meals locally to those in need, as well as hundreds of volunteers working on campus to assemble 100,000 food packs for Feed My Starving Children, an international organization that prepares and delivers food to famine-stricken countries.

Additionally, St. Scholastica students, faculty and staff will travel to the State Capitol to lobby legislators in support of the Minnesota State Grant program.

Students in St. Scholastica's first-year Dignitas program are preparing the Thanksgiving in the Spring meals. As a way to reach more people in need, students will be delivering home meals to local Duluth non-profit agencies such as the Damiano Center, CHUM Drop-In Center and The New San Marcos agency. Students will also deliver homebound meals to the hungry. The dinners will include turkey, mashed potatoes, vegetables, rolls and dessert.

 In the Feed My Starving Children effort, 500 volunteers from St. Scholastica and the broader community are expected to prepare 100,000 food pack meals. Volunteers will be packing food at Storm's Den on campus from noon until 7 p.m. Visit http://www2.css.edu/app/community/index.cfm for more information about volunteer work sites and times that students will be working.

The third initiative of Community Day will see more than 100 St. Scholastica students, faculty, and staff participating in Day at the Capitol, a lobbying effort in support of the Minnesota State Grant Program. The State Grant provides need-based aid for low- and middle-income college students at public and private colleges and universities across the state. As in past years, the St. Scholastica group is expected to be among the largest contingents from Minnesota private colleges to attend the event. The group will leave campus at 7 a.m. from the Mitchell Auditorium parking lot and return to campus at 4 p.m.

"The common theme of all three of these Community Day initiatives is that these are economically hard times," said Jay Newcomb, St. Scholastica's coordinator of service learning. "One of the places people suffer is food insecurity. It's really great that we're doing both this local action, feeding hundreds of people in our own community, and the Feed My Starving Children food pack, which will pack meals for 100,000 people in places around the world where it's really needed.

"Even our lobbying day at the Capitol is part of this same responding to economic hard times, because of the limits it would put on student access to higher education if Minnesota's state grant were cut. It's all part of the same thing and we at the College are really responding and trying to help."

For more information contact Jay Newcomb at (218) 723-6552 or jnewcomb@css.edu.