We Day Spirit Bringing Charitable Change To Trick-Or-Treating
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- This year, many of the kids who ring your doorbell on Halloween will be asking if you have any non-perishable foods that you'd like to donate to a food shelf.
It's a community service effort that comes directly out of We Day Minnesota.
Back on Oct. 8, about 18,000 middle and high school students spent the day at the Xcel Energy Center. The concert-filled experience was a reward for the service projects the students completed or planned to do.
Fast forward to this week. We Scare Hunger is a food drive that takes place on All Hallows' Eve. Students in Canada, where the founders of We Day are from, have been doing it for years. And now thousands of students across Minnesota will be taking part as well.
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Earlier this month, two students from the Breck School in Golden Valley, took the stage at the X to tell the We Day crowd about a way to turn Halloween into a night of giving, rather than receiving.
Gigi and Rachel Gunderson, of St. Louis Park, are eager to see more kids do what they did last Halloween.
"We just pretty much went door to door and after we asked for candy we were like,'Do you have any non-perishable foods that you'd like to donate?' and people were like 'Yeah, actually we do. That's a really good idea,'" said Gigi, who's a 9th grader.
Last year she was part of a small group that attended We Day Manitoba.
"When we all left, it was like 'that was so inspiring!'" she said. You really wanted to change the world, cause you felt like you could.
So weeks later, they collected 1,800 pounds of food to help restock a local food shelf. This year, the sisters are recruiting more students to give it a try.
"We just take it for granted, like being able to go to the grocery store and pick out anything you want...where kids my age can't even like get a full meal," Rachel Gunderson said.
Some food donations have already come in.
"Especially on a night where kids are thinking about themselves. It teaches them to stop and think about others," said Frederique Schmidt, a teacher at Breck.
Breck plans to donate all the food the students collect to two places: the Little Kitchen food shelf in northeast Minneapolis and the Division of Indian Work food shelf on East Lake Street.
Over the weekend, Breck students placed fliers on the doors of their neighbors throughout the metro, letting them know they will be asking for food donations Halloween night.
And many other schools are encouraging their students to do this as well. So if you live in one of the school districts that sent kids to We Day, you will likely have a trick-or-treater ask you for a food donation on Halloween.
