Over the next six weeks area high schools will collect food for the 34th annual Student Hunger Drive. A kickoff event will be held Monday night at The River Bend Foodbank in Davenport.
Foodbank President and CEO Mike Miller says the highlight of the evening, each year, is the skit competition where each of the 17 schools has less than one minute to illustrate the problem of hunger in this area.
"It is just amazing. There will be song, and dance, and skit and all sorts of things it is going to be really loud. We always get some good material out of it."
Miller says the evening feels like a high school prep rally.
After the kickoff, the schools will start to collect food for the next six weeks and their goal is to raise enough for 600,000 meals.
"More importantly one in six of their classmates don't have enough food. So when I think about the Student Hunger Drive I am envisioning all of those students collecting food to feed the one in six of their classmates that don't have enough. To me it is a beautiful picture of what this is all about."
Miller is proud that the nutritional quality of the food over the years has gone up and he thinks it shows the value of the Student Hunger Drive.
For anyone who isn't a student and wants to help, you can drop off donations at any of the 17 high schools. The drive ends on November 14th.
