Tomorrow, while many students are spending their time handing out candy to Trick-or-Treaters or attending a costume party, other members of the student body will be spending their time going door-to-door in order to collect cans for the Interchurch Food Bank of Johnson County.
This event, known as “Trick-or-Treat for Cans,” is a CG Student Council run operation. StuCo has been hosting this event since 2014, receiving hundreds of cans to be donated to local food banks. Trick-or-Treat for Cans is led by the Community Service committee of StuCo, whose members plan multiple community service-centered events throughout the school year. Junior Luci Sendelbach has been a member of the Community Service committee since her freshman year, and currently she is one of the leaders responsible for making sure the event is a success.
“Trick-or-Treat for Cans has been extremely successful in the past. We [Student Council] have collected a lot of cans from many different neighborhoods, and it always shocks the food pantry to see how many cans we bring to their facility,” Sendelbach said.
Sendelbach and her co-chairs, sophomores Ryan Wang and Harshith Jolla, began planning the event at the beginning of October. Together, they established which food pantry to provide donations and which neighborhoods they would visit. They also sent volunteer information via social media.
“Trick-or-Treat for Cans is where we first go around some neighborhoods and put flyers up that say that on Halloween we [members of Student Council] will come around to collect cans. Then, the members that signed up for the neighborhoods will go around and collect the cans door to door,” Wang said.
In addition to the current Community Service Chairs, senior Audrey Booher, the current All Student Body Vice President of StuCo, has been involved in Trick-or-Treat for Cans for the past three years. Booher decided to join the Community Service committee due to her history of volunteering and aims to encourage others to get involved in serving their community.
“Trick-or-Treat for Cans is valuable because it enables community members to lend a helping hand to those in Johnson County who need it. A lot of the time people can be intimated by the idea of getting involved in their community, and Trick or Treat for cans gives them an easy way to do that,” Booher said.
For this year, Sendelbach, Wang, and Jolla advise students to help out by having donations ready and to repost information about the event on social media.
