West Campus participated in the “Hunger Games,” a canned food drive that began Oct. 22 and will continue until Nov.15 with all donations going towards the App State Food Pantry and Hospitality House.
The food drive was created by Braxton Thompson, senior criminology major and a resident assistant in Newland Hall, and Larissa Jenkins, senior cell and molecular biology major and a resident assistant in Eggers Hall.
“The inspiration came from just having a general want to connect residents as well as other RA’s because we do have a very lovely community in Boone and we have the fortunate opportunity to go to such an awesome school and it just felt like we needed to give something back,” Thompson said.
Thompson and Jenkins both shared the same ideals and decided to put them together to create something to give back to the community and bring west campus together.
“We have a lot of time during training to get to know each other but throughout the year our staffs don’t get a lot of time to come together and stay together so we just wanted to create some friendly competition between the halls,” Jenkins said.
The food drive is a competition between all West Campus residence halls. The winning hall will receive a pizza dinner, from University Housing presidents Zach Birtsch and Crystal Harvey.
“It’s really to inspire residents to get connected to the community because Boone has one of the highest rates of food insecurity, and making residents aware that this is happening outside of the university,” Thompson said.
“The competition is strictly between the west side residence halls, but we are currently partnered with the ASU Food Pantry and the Hospitality House, as half of the proceeds will be going to each of those organizations, both on and off campus,“ Thompson said.
Along with the creation of the food drive, Thompson and Jenkins also thought to inspire participation that they would create a point system to determine a winner.
Each hall will receive one point for each canned food item, three points for peanut butter and two points for jelly. Each Ramen product will result in a deduction of one point. A hall can place Ramen in an opposing hall’s box to sabotage it.
“Our goal is to have 3,000 food products by the end and to encourage residents to participate and let them understand what they can do to help the community,” Jenkins said.
Story by Brooke Bryant
Graphic by Efrain Arias-Medina Jr.
