VICENZA, Italy (February 26, 2019) -- Members of Vicenza High School National Honor Society delivered well over 1,000 pounds of dry pasta to a local charity.
Over the course of three weeks from late January into early February, members of the VHS chapter of NHS collected pasta from students and faculty for its annual chapter-wide service project. The donation went to Caritas Diocesana Vicentina, a charity in downtown Vicenza.
The idea for a pasta drive arose as an improvement on last year's service project. That year, the chapter held a general canned food drive.
"We had a great turnout, but some of us felt like the processed American foods we were giving weren't of much use to the donation recipients," said chapter president Emma Mollner, a 12th-grader. So, for the sake of a simpler and more standardized project, the club came up with the idea for a pasta drive.
After voting favorably on the idea, NHS members got to work, spending their next several lunch meetings decorating boxes to place in each classroom and creating posters and flyers to post around the school. As incentive, NHS added an element of competition; the classroom with the most donations would receive free movie tickets.
For the next three weeks, students and staff brought in numerous bags and boxes of pasta to donate, with some classrooms' boxes overflowing to the point of needing another box. On Feb. 14 -- the last day of donations -- NHS members roved through school hallways with shopping carts, collecting each classroom's box in preparation for delivery.
With donations collected, it was time to make the delivery. On Feb. 15 -- a teacher workday which the rest of the student body had off -- a group of NHS members loaded Mollner's car with the numerous boxes of pasta and drove to Caritas, where they were received warmly by staff.
"We are very grateful for their donations," one Caritas employee stated. "It's incredible that these young people can do such great things."
After returning with a second carload of pasta, Caritas gathered the students' information to send a letter of appreciation to the school's NHS chapter.
When speaking of the project's success, Mollner emphasizes the need for students and faculty to work together to give back to their community.
"It was very much a team effort," she remarked. "I'm glad we were able to involve the entire school community in our project."
Chapter sponsor Gregory DeJardin, an English teacher at VHS, was not surprised at the service project's success. He lauded National Honor Society members as "self-starters and problem solvers" that "govern themselves," and added that it is a pleasure to work with such motivated young people.
Vicenza High School's NHS chapter is far from finished for the year, however. The next order of business is to plan the April induction ceremony for new members, and the chapter will continue its tradition of providing teachers with goodie bags and cards for Teacher Appreciation Week in May. Furthermore, each member is required to complete an individual service project, either alone or in a group, which range from donation drives for various causes to tutoring at the elementary and middle schools. NHS and its members will certainly remain busy until the end of the school year.
Caritas Diocesana Vicentina is the Vicenza component of Caritas Internationalis, a Catholic-inspired international confederation of development, relief and social service agencies that undertakes global humanitarian aid projects.
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