BLAINE, Minn. – (Jan. 28, 2015) – Students participating in youth service clubs at Anoka, Blaine and Champlin Park High Schools are shedding light on the issue of homelessness by participating in the We Won’t Rest campaign. This initiative encourages students across the United States to learn and share daily facts about the issue on social media, and then take action by connecting with a homeless shelters or similar organization in the local community.
Blaine High School Students started out their Wednesday morning with a B.A.S.H: Bengals Against Starvation and Homelessness. Youth Service Coordinator, Julie Phillips explained how they came up with their initiatives.
“One of the things that was on the plate was “We act” and “We day”. The group needed to choose a global and a local project and so we talked about it for a couple of weeks and they really thought that feed my starving Children was something that all of Blaine High school felt passionate about already so they chose feed my starving children, it’s something we can serve at here locally but its benefitting globally,” said Phillips.
Phillips highlighted that not only the students leaders in the group will be participating, but the whole school will be getting involved.
“We’ve had groups of between 30 and 60 students go there every single month from all of the school year- September, and I have it scheduled out all the way through May.”
Locally, they will be teaming up with the non profit Hope 4 Youth which works with homeless youth in the north metro suburbs. Karrie Schaaf, the District Homeless Liaison was able to help them identify a not profit.
“Often, they’ll call and as the homeless liaison I know of a variety of community projects that are going on or non-profits in that area and hope for Youth was just a perfect fit for what they were doing and their focus on homelessness and hunger,” Schaaf said.
Though many of the students may not directly be affected by those issues, Schaaf said many of these issues hit very close to home.
“As of yesterday, we’ve identified 750 students throughout the district as experiencing homelessness and 170 of them are unaccompanied youth so without their parent or guardian.”
Phillps noted that the passionate students even figured out a creative way to get teachers involved.
“The students started, they wanted to do penny wars, or a coin drive and that’s just been done so often, and so many times they just wanted to do something exciting and fun and different. So we threw around a lot of ideas and how can we get students excited and so finally they decided like a teacher against teach and yet we didn’t know how that would work in bracket systems and all of a sudden somebody said – Survivor!”
They chose twelve of their favorite teachers to go head to head in a fundraiser that’s designed like the popular TV show.
“So basically they each have a container with their picture and name on it. We’ll be voting with their donations at lunch and also in the teacher’s classrooms. All donations will be counted at the end of everyday and the teacher with the least amount of donations will be eliminated,” Phillips said.
The students like Amera Hassan are confident that they’ll reach their goal. In fact, confident would be an understatement.
“Our goal was to raise $15,000 by May, 15, 2015 but we’re going to blow that out of the water.”
And with this campaign, students want to accomplish more than just raising money.
“I want everyone to be involved and to realize that there’s more to the world than just you , there’s people around you and even though you might not change the world, overnight you can make a change,” Hassan said.
Hassan hopes that this will just be the tip of the iceberg
“People should start opening their eyes to the world and finding out more about their communities and how they might be able to help”
Each high school in the Anoka-Hennepin District has a youth service coordinator that works to provide meaningful leadership and service opportunities, trips and projects to benefit the local and global community.
