Kid-Powered Donations to Fight Hunger

A number of years ago, I became involved with Bend Food Project, a local nonprofit started by a group of friends in 2015 to help fight hunger in our area. Modeled after similar projects around the country, the door-to-door food collection system is both simple and efficient. Donors buy an extra can or box of non-perishable food when they go shopping and place those in a green bag (in some other programs the bags are blue). The bag is picked up outside their front door every other month by neighborhood managers like me, who leave an empty one behind. The full bags are dropped off at the Bend Food Project collection site where volunteers are waiting to unload their cars, empty the bags, and sort all the food, which is used to stock to the local food pantry.

I love the simple, efficient approach that makes donating food to help fight hunger so easy. So, when the organization sent out an email asking for a volunteer to write profiles about volunteers who were doing even more to help out, I jumped. Below you’ll find one of the profiles I wrote up. I hope this inspires you as much as it does me.

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Donations to Bend Food Project come from all sorts of people who want to help fight hunger and alleviate the all-too-prevalent problem of local food insecurity. Usually, however, the donors are adults who live in the area. Usually, but not always.

When Carter and Carrie Rabasa were finally able to hold their CascadiaJS tech conference at the Sunriver Resort after a long, Covid-related delay, they realized they were sitting on a pile of unused swag. “We had a hundred hoodies leftover from previous years,” says Carter. “So, we thought it’d be pretty cool to use this surplus inventory to raise some money for a local charity in Bend.”

The family, including then 12-year-old Quinn and 11-year-old Emily, all agreed that doing some good in the area where they were holding their annual conference was a great idea. But which charity did they want to support? As Seattle residents, they weren’t exactly familiar with Bend’s nonprofit scene. Since one of the speakers at the conference, Chris Coyier, is a local Bendite, Carter emailed him and received a list of potential organizations in return. Then father and son clicked through all the different websites.

“We liked Bend Food Project the most,” Carter says. Later, he asked his kids to think about what food insecurity means. “It made me sad,” says Quinn. “’Cause not all people have enough food.”

It was agreed that Emily and Quinn would handle all the sales. To boost their motivation with their effort to help fight hunger and teach them to be entrepreneurial, their parents agreed that the siblings would be able to keep $1 per hoodie. The rest would go to the Bend Food Project.

That’s when Quinn went to work. Over three to four weeks, he created a 30-second animation to promote the sale of the hoodies along with the fact that a portion of the proceeds would go to a local charity. On the morning of Day 2, the kids introduced the video to the three hundred attendees and then added a short live spiel to encourage folks to come out.

It worked. By the time they’d opened for sales, a long line had already formed. Emily and Quinn sold fifty $15 hoodies, raising $650 for the Bend Food Project’s efforts to help fight hunger.

“As parents, we’re always trying to get our kids to think about stuff like this and put some time and some effort into helping out,” says Carter. “So, this was just a really fun project to work on.”