"Unity Starts With Us"

What is giving? To me, giving is sacrificing your time and presence for the support of others. It isn’t always an expensive gift and it also isn’t something that you only do on special occasions, but rather on a daily basis. We wondered, “How can we reach out to the high number of students at our school that are homeless?” Our Key Club vice president of last year, Megan VanDyke began a holiday tradition that has touched the hearts of many in our community and school. It’s an event that I hope will continue beyond my own high school years. We call it our “Warm Hearts Drive.”

For this drive, we create care packages that consists of warm blankets, mittens, scarves, socks, candies, etc. that gets passed out to all of our anonymous homeless students in our school by our counselors. The process starts with advertising and requesting for the goods. All of the items we receive and bundle are generously donated by our staff, club members,  friends, families, and sponsors from our local area. During our club meetings, we take the time to create thoughtful holiday cards and assemble the bags to be ready for passing out. After a month of preparation, our job is done.

During the last week before winter break, we get to see everything unravel. It’s almost as if you can sense the change in the air and see our “Foss Family” coming together. I think it’s a good feeling to have when you know that your peers care for you and want to support you in every way that they can, even if they don’t know who you are. This year, I was honored to be able to help lead and contribute to this drive as vice president of Henry Foss Key Club alongside my wonderful group of officers and advisor.

This act of giving has raised the sense of camaraderie at my school that I hope will continually build up and flourish.  It’s also one of the reasons why I strongly encourage people to give and serve others – unity starts with us.