Caring students at Bishop Vesey’s Grammar School have collected almost 1000 items to help struggling families this Christmas after organising a Food Bank appeal.
Sixth formers Krishan Patel, Laura Jaison and Yuan Sagala mobilised the class tutors to help spread the message of the appeal to all years, and put up posters around the school in the lead-up to a two-week collection period.
Krishan said: “Firstly, we would just like to say a big ‘thank you’ to everyone who has helped us with organising the donation appeal and donated items.
“It all started in late October, when there was a lot of media coverage about initiatives to help people over the next few months, such as the extension of free school meals.
“This reached conversations in our friendship groups and sparked our own ideas. We started talking about how we could help people, especially during the climate of Covid-19?”
The three friends brainstormed ideas and came up with creating a food donation campaign that would appeal to the whole Vesey community. The campaign would collect for one of the many local Food Banks which are desperately in need of items due to reduced donations from people who are now isolating.
Laura said: “We started to contact local food banks about whether they were taking in donations and we found that Sutton Coldfield Baptist Church Food Bank was. So, we emailed them about our idea, and they were happy to receive any donations made and emailed us back with a list of potential item donations.
“We started to plan how we were going to accomplish our goal of collecting as many items as possible. We regularly contacted the food bank to make sure that our donations would be accepted and confirmed a drop-off date with them.”
To spread the word about the appeal, they created posters to put up around the school, produced online reminders to be put onto Vesey’s daily newsfeed and contacted all form tutors to raise further awareness.
“The appeal was also constantly communicated to forms when we were collecting the donations from the classrooms from November 9th to November 20th,” Laura said. “With constant reminders to the whole school to donate, we tried to maximise the amount of food that could be donated.”
During the two-week collection period, the items were collected from forms to be stored in the Seminar room in the STEM Block.
“We are very proud of what Krishan, Laura and Yuan achieved through the appeal and I’d like to thank the entire Vesey community for the way they came together and donated so many items,”
– HEADTEACHER DOMINIC ROBSON
Yuan added: “The donations were counted and dropped off to the Food Bank on November 26th with the help of the caretaker using the school minibus – we would like to thank him for his help. Also, to thank Mrs Ashby for the use of her room for storage of items!
“Overall, we have collectively as a school donated 991 items to the Baptist Church Food Bank.
“We believe that this is a huge success and without the generosity of the Vesey Community, we would not have been able to collect this many donations.
“We hope that we can carry on food donation appeals as a school and keep on supporting our community in this way.”
BVGS headteacher Dominic Robson said: “We are very proud of what Krishan, Laura and Yuan achieved through the appeal and I’d like to thank the entire Vesey community for the way they came together and donated so many items.”