Assisting More Than Residents
Warren Towers resident assistants give back to the community at local food bank
At the start of the semester, 37 Warren Towers resident assistants made 6,407 meals possible for the hungry and homeless throughout Boston.
As part of their spring training and development program, the RAs volunteered with the Greater Boston Food Bank, a nonprofit whose mission is to help end hunger in eastern Massachusetts.
“We wanted to do an activity together as a group, while at the same time giving something back to the community we all call home,” says Paul Hughes, the area director for Warren Towers. “The Food Bank provided us the opportunity to meet both of these objectives.”
The group, which included David Voss (ENG’10), the senior resident assistant for training and development, Warren hall directors Ben Champney and Nelson Feliciano, and RAs Brian Parow (SAR’11) and Becky Sargent (SED’09), sorted through donated and salvaged boxes of food to find fresh items that could be redistributed and eaten safely. During the four-hour period, they sorted through 10,414 pounds of food, salvaged 8,331 pounds of food, and made 6,407 meals possible for the clients of the Greater Boston Food Bank.
“The RAs appreciated the opportunity to get off campus as a group, work together to complete a common goal, and learn about the crucial need that the Food Bank meets in the Boston area,” Hughes says.
The Greater Boston Food Bank feeds more than 320,000 people annually in nine counties in eastern Massachusetts. It is the largest hunger-relief organization in New England and one of the largest food banks in the country, distributing approximately 30 million pounds of food and grocery products annually to more than 600 member hunger-relief agencies.
Davide Nardi can be reached at dnardi@bu.edu.
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