As Utah State University students go out in the community and knock door-to-door in the freezing cold, there are families in need that are grateful for their help and sacrifice to make their own lives a little easier. The service center will be hosting another “Stuff-A-Bus Blitz Night,” on Nov. 28, 2011. This will be the fourth and final blitz night taking place at the Romney Stadium parking lot at six p.m. Students, faculty and staff of USU are all welcome to attend the event and will participate in donating food for the Cache Valley food bank.
An Aggie shuttle driver by the name of Alben Erickson started “Stuff-A-Bus,” seven years ago for Subs for Santa and the Cache Valley food pantry. He then turned it over to the Service Center Department that is currently headed by the Associated Students of Utah State University's service vice president Maddie Busteed.
There are three parts to the stuff-a-bus program, according to Busteed. The first being the blitz nights which are done on four consecutive Mondays in November. Students and staff meet at the Romney Stadium parking lot and then proceed to split up into groups, taking shuttles to different parts of the community to gather food.
The second part includes a contest titled, “Penny Wars” where volunteers gather change from the community and students to donate to the food bank.
The third and final part to the program is the “store days.” Volunteers go to different stores around town and ask people to buy food at the store they're at then leave it in boxes at the front of the store.
“We have four more store days,” said Busteed, “we'll stand outside the stores for four to five hours asking for food donations... and at the end of November the food bank will let us know how many pounds of food were donated,” she said.
Hannah Leve, a sophomore at USU, attended the blitz night with her sorority during Greek Week. The entire Greek community came for it and around 300 people were in attendance.
“We had an awesome response from the community. People would give us everything they had in their pantry and we got to meet and talk to people while doing it.” Leve said.
USU sophomore, Stephenie Duncan also attended a previous blitz night for the food pantry.
“I thought it was pretty fun, it was cool to see how many people showed up to help. Doing service made me feel so good, I love doing service and it gave me a great opportunity to do some,” Duncan said.
The food pantry is open Monday through Thursday and is available to people in the community in need. For upcoming events and ways to donate and help the pantry, more information can be found at the Cache Community Food Pantry's blog at http://cachefoodpantry.wordpress.com/.
(J.Ruggles)
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