The Public Service Practicum run food drive collected a total of 14,000 lbs of food this year.

“There are homeless shelters and food pantries that we donate the food to. This donated food will help feed hundreds of people in need,” said senior PSP member Mitchell Moczisko.

The donated food serves as an aid community wide and help those in need

“We donated the food to five different organizations. PLAN which is located in Round Lake Beach, the Lake Villa Food Pantry, Veterans Memorial, St. Gilberts and Holiday Help which is an organization that aids student’s families here at North,” said senior PSP member Daniel Yates.

This community outreach opportunity has been taking place at North since 2007 and will continue given it relative success in the past, not in just donated food but for student experiences as well.

“We get a varying amount of food every year.  Sometimes it’s around 5,000 pounds, sometimes it’s higher. Our record is 21,000.  But the food isn’t the end goal – the goal is to provide an opportunity for students to get involved, help their community, learn about social issues, and show leadership.  If those things happen, I think it’s successful, even if we didn’t get as much food as we may have hoped for,” said Christopher Kubic.

The PSP students play a critical role in the success of the food drive with their assigned jobs in helping to do many different things.

“We had some students get materials (boxes). Others were the marketing group that made  and hung up posters. When the food drive is done, we will have people that will have to weigh the food,” Moczisko said.

Spreading the word is important for any event to be known, but there is even an added incentive.

“We hung up posters around the school and are in the process of emailing teachers to tell the students. Also, as an added incentive, the class with the most donations get a free day off heart rate,” Yates said.

PSP cannot help but be pleased with the public turnout to donate.

“We got about 5,000 pounds of actual food, and we got about $1200 in donations. Food banks can purchase 9 pounds of food for every dollar, so the monetary donations would generate an additional 7200 pounds of food, bringing the grand total to over 14,000 pounds of food.  It’s hard to compare from year to year because we do the drive differently each year, but we are very happy with this result,” Kubic