Cameron McCoy said delivering food and hygienic items to the homeless with about 30 of his classmates at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences only reinforced his thankfulness for the little that he did have growing up.
“As a child, I had moments when there was no heat,” said McCoy, who grew up in Chicago. “We ate little things, like ramen noodles with hot dogs inside, or bread from the local church. But I’d never been to a homeless shelter.”
The students, in teacher JaMonica Marion’s Agricultural Education course, delivered more than 150 backpacks and seven boxes filled with granola, deodorant, water and more on Tuesday to Pacific Garden Mission, 1458 S. Canal, one of Chicago’s largest homeless shelters housing 1,200 people a night, according to Stephen Welch, executive assistant for the shelter president’s office.
Janet Jennings, a 52-year-old resident of Pacific Garden said she moved there after her home burned down in Logansport, Indiana this February. She said seeing the students lit up her day:
“Their faces were elated, and so was my heart,” she said, adding that she prayed out loud and shook the hand of the young man who handed her a backpack.
“When he shook my hand, I said Father God, bless this young man and thank you for letting him help people who are unfortunate,” she said.
The students also toured the shelter, prepared the bed sheets for more than 300 residents and ate lunch with residents, Marion said.
“A lot of people donate, but never actually see the life of people at the shelter and sit down with them,” she said. “It really was eye-opening for the students, because they were able to see how people ended up homeless and put a face on it. It helped them see that it’s not limited to one race or age bracket.”
Students Ashton Brown, 17, and Christopher James, 16, agreed with their teacher that they were able to share intimate moments with some of the residents.
“One of the ladies was very excited to see us,” Brown said. “She told us her parents put her out of her home when she was about nine years old and was on the streets, then became addicted to crack cocaine for most of her life.”
Brown choked up a bit when he said the woman encouraged him and his classmates to “take advantage of life before life takes advantage of us, follow our dreams and never let anyone tell us we can’t be what we want to be.”
James quoted what Marion said about homelessness not being limited to one type of person: “Anyone could end up there, and even in school, you don’t know that the person sitting next to you might be hungry.”
The students ran a drive to collect the donated items and visited the shelter as part of the nationwide Lead2Feed campaign, which aims to educate students about hunger through having them find creative ways to give food and educate their communities about hunger.
The program awards five grand prize awards, which include $25,000 for the winning team’s nonprofit of choice as well as $20,000 for school technology products, according to Debby Dodge, a grant manager for Lead2Feed. She said the program also awards 10 second-place prizes of $10,000 donated to the students’ nonprofit of choice and 10 third-place prizes of $5,000 donated to the students’ nonprofit of choice. The second- and third-place prizes do not include awards for school use.
More than 1,000 schools are competing in this year’s competition, Dodge said, adding that the agricultural school has yet to be selected for a prize.
Project submissions for the competition – including a description of what the project entailed – are due by April 17, Dodge said, adding that each year, entries are due around the same time.
Dodge said the winners are not necessarily those who raise the most items, but tend to be those whose project reveals a meaningful impact in addressing hunger.
The project appears to have had a strong impact on some of the students at the agricultural school, including Brown and James.
As Brown greeted residents at the shelter, he said he noticed that some of them were crying “tears of joy to see us. It was heartbreaking. I was tearing up too as I was handing them the bags.”
James agreed that the day was full of “a lot of mixed emotions.”
Brown said he and James, who are close friends, “realized that a lot of these people have struggled in life, and they’re not necessarily bad, they just had bad paths.”
Brown and James returned to the shelter Wednesday to deliver four boxes of clothes collected by Brown’s boss at a local Taco Bell. They said after Tuesday’s experience, they plan to continue visiting the shelter whenever they can.
Tara Kadioglu is a freelance reporter
