Clothes/Food Drive
The Storehouse
Extra Credit for Students
(CommGrads)

Hello everyone – 

CommGrads is working on making C&J more visible not just to students, but to the Albuquerque community.  Because of this, we have been talking to The Storehouse – NM’s largest food bank.  This is a small excerpt of their mission statement: 

We are New Mexico’s largest food pantry. More and more of Albuquerque’s working poor are struggling to feed themselves and their families. Money is tight for everyone, but one illness, a reduction of work hours, or any setback can leave a family wondering where their next meal is coming from or how they will get clothing or shoes. We provide FREE food and clothing to people who are struggling. We are in constant need of donations of money, food or clothing. We rely entirely on donations and volunteers in our mission. 

The Storehouse does incredible work with our community and we want to help.  We have developed the following strategy to get our faculty and students (both undergraduate and graduate) to participate in this clothes/food drive.  We encourage you to be supportive of this project and help us make a difference in our community. 

Details:

• Donation cycle from November until the week before finals
• We want to encourage our faculty and TAs to provide their students extra credit (EC) for this community service project.  Those who do not teach can pick a class they wish to contribute to and help out with that class’ donation collection. 
• We have broken up the donations to the following categories:
  • Faculty: clothes and/or blanket donations (2 points per item / Packs of socks count as 1 item)
  • Graduate students: clothes and/or blanket donations (2 points per item)
  • Undergraduates: food donations (1 EC point per 2 canned food items / Limit 10 EC points)
• We also want to make this a friendly competition among our classes.  Whichever class donates the most items will have their picture taken and be recognized by the Storehouse and the C&J Department as the winner of the Canned Food Drive competition. The winning class will also get a choice of having a pizza party at the end of the semester OR donating the total monetary value of the pizza party to The Storehouse.

Sincerely,