Tackling World Hunger Becomes Goal Of Brawley's Public Schools
This article is presented in partnership with CA Lottery.
Have you ever really been hungry? Most of us have never felt deep, bone-crushing hunger; but if we did, help would probably be as close as our own refrigerators. We're lucky that we can take the milk and eggs for granted. Many of the kids in the Brawley Union High School District don't have this luxury. Yet it is this same group of kids, along with their educators, that are seeking to create change and eradicate hunger, both at home and around the world.
Eradicating Hunger in Agriculture's Heartland
Brawley, California is a small community and the local high school reflects this, with only around 1,500 students enrolled. An agricultural border town, Brawley has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country and the majority of kids going to school there receive free breakfast and lunch. It's a good thing, too, because many of them come to school hungry.
Ines Lovio-Estrada has seen many kids come and go during her 13 years at Brawley. A career technical education instructor, Estrada has witnessed first-hand a different kind of hunger in these kids: the hunger to create change and make a difference not only in their own small community, but on the rest of the planet as well.
Understanding that it takes a full belly to focus the mind and produce results, Estrada and her students got involved in Lead2Feed, a program spearheaded by the Lift-a-Life Foundation and USA Today Educational Foundation. Through a standards-based curriculum of 10 lessons about leadership given free of charge to schools, Lead2Feed propels public school kids to take on the mission of eradicating hunger through a service-learning project they design themselves.
The students participate as teams and also choose a non-profit, hunger-related organization that will benefit from their efforts. Encouraged to think big, plan big and create big change, both in the world, on their teams and in themselves, the teams are encouraged to compete for the World Hunger Leadership Challenge Award. Around half a million children from over 2,500 schools and clubs across the country participate in the Challenge, striving to win a whopping $250,000 in prize money grants for their charity.
A Personal Mission from a Powerful Teacher
"In class, we started investigating different issues in our community that were important to us and one of them we felt passionately about as a group was food security. Many of the kids had no idea they were not food secure until we started the program. They thought it was normal not to have three meals a day, or a full refrigerator," explains Estrada, who teaches public and community health to 11th and 12th graders.
"They go through the lessons together as a group, come up with a group name and slogan and decide together how they are going to address the problem of hunger. A lot of the work they do, like fund raising or canned food drives, is done on their own time after school. Lots of these kids don't have parental support but they're out there doing it anyway," she adds.
One of Estrada's teams, "The Van-Go's," held multiple, successful fundraisers for WhyHunger, an organization that supports grassroots efforts to end hunger and poverty. Another team that named themselves "Give a Little, Love a Little" collected cans for a powerful free food day at The House of Bread Ministries for homeless individuals and families.
It may just take one can, or one student at a time, but the kids at Brawley and their very involved teacher know that can end hunger as it now exists on the planet. "My goal is to get every student in every school involved," she says.
Corey Whelan is a freelance writer in New York. Her work can be found at Examiner.com.
