Aliso Niguel High School’s Second Harvest Food Bank club offers Aliso’s students a chance to help their community and better their odds of college admission.
The Second Harvest Food Bank is a club at Aliso centered around providing volunteer work for Second Harvest, a food pantry centered out of Orange County. The farm which volunteers spend their time at is completely volunteer run. The organization’s goal is to provide underprivileged families access to nutritional food.
For many families with lower incomes, food is not the most difficult thing to find. Cheap and unhealthy ‘junk’ foods dominate the low price market in every supermarket and gas station across the nation. Second Harvest Food Bank’s goal is to offer an alternative to the unhealthy lifestyle brought about by poverty for families who apply.
The food bank largely focuses its efforts in the southern California area, allowing students to directly benefit their own communities.
The available volunteer hours come monthly. Every second Saturday of the month, from 9-11am, members of the club have the chance to go to Second Harvest’s farm in Irvine’s Great Park. There, roughly 45 acres of fields, that the food bank owns, must be regularly tended to which requires constant attention. Participants of the club’s volunteer sessions do an array of farm based jobs ranging from de-weeding, to picking and throwing watermelons.
Ava Adibi (11) is the club’s secretary and participates in all of the club’s events. She said volunteering on the farm is, “super fun to plant stuff and it goes to a good cause.”
The club gained most of its members from Aliso’s Club Rush event during the first semester. There are roughly 100 members who are officially in the club, however only about 10-12 volunteers are able to make it to the monthly volunteer sessions.
The low amount of volunteers is mainly due to the early time and date chosen, as Saturdays are usually days taken up by highschool sports.
However Quinn Curtis (11), the club’s president and founder, urges hesitant students to join in on the early excursions. Curtis said, “Volunteer hours for clubs can’t really hurt.”
If students are interested in the club, Second Harvest Food Bank has monthly meetings every second Friday of the month, a day before their monthly volunteer opportunity. The club is always open to allowing new members who are ready and willing to help their cause and join in on their Saturday morning work.
Many of Aliso Niguel High School’s students join clubs in order to bolster their college repertoire. The Second Harvest offers students of all classes an opportunity to further their standings on college applications. While the act of volunteering for the impoverished itself puts students in a good standing with colleges, if students want to step up and become representatives for their grade they set themselves up to proceed as the president of the club.
The Second Harvest Food Bank is a club which allows students to earn large amounts of volunteer hours on a scheduled basis while also providing for their immediate community.
