After the many hurricanes and other disasters, more and more are hungry, but senior Hannah Kent strives to help change that. Kent wants to help others — especially because her church encourages her to do so — so she decided to use her Senior Project as an opportunity provide relief to the less fortunate.

“I’m organizing a food packaging event … called a hunger project, with the organization called Feeding Children Everywhere,” Kent said.

Successfully organizing a large fund-raising event involves many steps.

“Making it work are volunteers… that are provided meals to package, simple meals like lentils and rice, but it’s like an assembly line, and with the meals produced. For me, I’m having them send [the meals] to children who have been affected by the recent hurricanes,” Kent said. “In order to do this I have to raise a lot of money. Initially my original goal was 20,000 meals or $6,000 but now I’m looking at possibly reducing that budget, to maybe $4,500 or $4,000.”

This isn’t the first time Kent has been involved in feeding the hungry.

“I wanted to do this project because I participated in a hunger project before, through my church. It’s a really high-energy, fun event and I was kind of inspired by [2014 graduate Tatiana Martin] who did a similar project about five years ago,” Kent said. “But I thought it would be different from learning to play an instrument or learning how to scuba dive, even though those are super-cool projects. I also saw it as an opportunity to get out there and give back to my community and really help others.”

Language Arts teacher and Senior Project Coordinator Mary Nelson lauded Kent’s efforts.

“I guess because she’s giving back to the community in a huge way and her expectations are pretty, enormous. She’s going to have to do a lot of work to accomplish it, so she’ll have some long-lasting results because of it.”

Kent’s food-packaging event has been scheduled for Jan. 19 at Suntree United Methodist Church.

By Annelise Williams