CAS @ Didzdvaris gymnasium: [IB9] Voluntary work for the "Food Bank" action ||| Part 2

Vaiva Zokaitė -

Even though it is not possible to get the IB diploma without completing Creativity, Action and Service hours, it’s not something students of Didždvaris feel like is mandatory or tiring to do – helping others is incredibly rewarding and volunteering becomes a good sort of addiction. Therefore, we’re always seeking for new opportunities to help and in the mood to do well.

“Food Bank” (lith. “Maisto Bankas”) is an organization we’ve started collaborating with not so long ago. Their mission is very simple – help those who need help the most and fill their fridges with food. The project we volunteered to take a part in that my classmate has already written about turned out to be a great success, so it was exciting to find out about a new one. It is called “Kviečiu į svečius“ and it involves two types of people – hosts and guests. The hosts, who are usually people fond of cooking, prepare and serve meals to the guests, who (after they’ve enjoyed the food) express their gratitude by giving some money that goes straight to the “Food Bank”. This way the organization can carry on distributing food products to those in need and stop worrying about the expenses of doing charitable work.

We brainstormed ideas on how we could do this project so it involves as many people as possible and everybody in our group gets to cook. There was one thing we knew for sure – we were going to bake cookies. It was an interesting and rather educational experience as some of us had never done it before. The work was distributed among 3 groups in our class, who came to bake the cookies after classes were over. It was way more fun then we’d expected and I can affirm that cooking with someone does help to create stronger bonds between people and it was some true teamwork.

The cookies were done and we were ready to share them. There were some last minute change of plans, but that didn’t throw us off at all – one of the 3 groups took initiative and used their creativity skills to come up with a new plan. It turned out to be simple, but genius and some of us spent the entire day at school selling cookies to the students and teachers of Didždvaris. The idea went hand in hand with International Day for Tolerance and positive vibes were floating around the hallways of our school.

What did we achieve? 136Lt in cash only for selling mouthwatering cookies. In fact, the money we raised will be multiplied by 16, thanks to the organization, and used to provide food for those in need. What did we learn? We learned, once again, that giving is a zillion times better than receiving. Oh, and we all know how to bake cookies now.