AC student fundraising group raises $1,000 in donations to fight food insecurity
Posted on Monday, August 8th, 2022
Vipul Grover and his team in the Project Management program at Algonquin College wanted to help fight food insecurity among students. Their resulting fundraising project is one of the many that will be on display during the RE/ACTION Showcase on Aug. 12.
Their plan was designed with the intent to raise $1,000 in grocery donations for the College’s Students’ Association Food Cupboard, a resource that provides groceries and other aid to students who are financially struggling.
Roughly 40 per cent of post-secondary students in Canada face inadequate access to food, according to a study released by Meal Exchange, a Canadian charitable organization. Grover and his team — also consisting of Brianna Munch, Juhi Pinto, Karen Gil, Ronak Bhasin and Ekta Patel — chose to work on student food security due to team members and friends’ previous use of the Food Cupboard.
“I think one of the critical reasons why we have picked this project is because there (are) two students in our group (who) were actually facing this challenge, and they have been helped by the Algonquin Food Cupboard…,” said Grover. “We were kind of inspired with all the initiatives.”
With a busy schedule of classes and co-ops, the group had to put their heads together to try and figure out how to raise the money as efficiently as possible. Their tactics, said Grover, needed to be cheap and simple fundraising efforts that could be completed with only a few members.
The first effort was a Canada Day-themed bake sale, where group members baked maple leaf-shaped cookies and sold them door-to-door for a few dollars apiece.
“Some of the doors were being slammed on them,” said Grover. “And some of the people actually said yes and they bought the cookies…and from that we raised about $50.”
The team also designed donation boxes along with posters specifying their purpose as funding a student food program. The boxes were placed at Bhasin’s workplace and raised more than $240 altogether. The next boots-on-the-ground fundraising effort was the selling of handmade crafts, including a Canadian flag made of coloured string nailed to a wooden board.
With funds in hand, the group then made liberal use of Walmart sales and Patel’s employee discount, bringing them to their desire total of $1,000 in grocery donations for the Food Cupboard. According to the team’s professor, David Solomon, the group was one of seven that, together, successfully raised more than $10,000 in donated goods for the Food Cupboard.
“At the end of the day, it…came out to be an initiative where we really want to help Algonquin students and, you know, friends and family and society,” said Grover.
Grover, Munch, Pinto, Gil, Bhasin and Patel will present the results of their findings on Aug. 12 during the RE/ACTION event, which will be held in a hybrid format. See here for more information on the showcase and click here to register.