What can I, as a freshman in college, do to help make an impact or a change in the world around us? Well it just happens to be that I have taken it upon myself to do so. Even though it’s supposed to be about what I “could” do, it’s something I am doing. I’ve always had a thing for volunteering and helping in my community. Something that people don’t is that Chambersburg has a high population of low income families. There are many families that don’t have many meals or if they do it’s very little. They also don’t realize the ones who suffer the most in these families are the kids.

Less than 5 years ago there was a program created called the Backpack Program. It ran out of one of the elementary schools, Ben Chambers. Food donations would be made as well as getting food from the food pantry and a menu would be made up for a meal for each child signed up for the weekend. They would pack the backpacks for the kids and then they would send the with the children home on Friday’s. Ben chambers has one of the highest number of low income children who don’t get meals during the weekend.

Recently the program has moved to the church I attend. I’ve helped with the program for the past two years volunteering. We did a summer outreach where families from Ben Chambers signed up to get food. For a week, we made up 2-3 boxes of food with meals and gave them to different families throughout Chambersburg. These families were more than grateful and happy that they were given meals for their families that they wouldn’t have been able to provide. For the past 2 years we have been operating out of our church where people from the church donate food, volunteer to pack the bags or volunteer to take the bags to the kids.

I have made a change in the community by volunteering to pick up the backpacks once a week so people could pack them on Wednesdays. Sounds like nothing right? I do that as well as pack them, which there are over 70 backpacks to fill which takes 1-2 hours to do so. I’ve gotten younger kids from the youth group involved by letting them help pack the backpacks to get more involved even though it’s such a simple task. Currently I am trying to organize where elementary school kids can help pack the backpacks to get them involved in their community and to hope they will do the same when they get older. What the elementary school kids don’t realize is that kids just like them don’t have meals to eat sometimes and that giving the gift of food is a wonderful thing. Even though it is such a simple thing, I am making a difference as a freshman in college just by packing backpacks for kids.

The program is helping poverty stricken families, mostly the children, eat meals they most likely wouldn’t get if it weren’t for this program. I plan to keep helping out with this program for as long as I can because it is such a great thing that I can do to help out my community as well as help get younger children educated as to what is going on around them. Just because I am a full time freshman in college with a part time job as well as other priorities, doesn’t mean I can’t help make a difference in the world or just in my community. It’s the simple things that can make the most difference. So that is a change in the world that can be made by a college student.