Every year, Ross has a corporate wide food drive involving all 40 of its campuses to benefit local shelters. This year, the Evansville, Indiana Ross Medical Education Center campus partnered with Tri-State Food Bank. This food bank has been in the area for about 35 years and began simply with a borrowed pickup truck and a desire to help their neighbors in need. From those humble beginnings, they have grown to be able to distribute over eight million pounds of food each year to those in need across three states.
Instead of counting items individually, the campus had a different idea with their drive. They took the shelter’s top five needed items and gave them either negative points or positive points. The positive points were items that each class would want to keep to help their total. These items included peanut butter, soup, and canned tuna. Negative points were points each class would want to give to another class to try and bring their total score down. Negative points were dominating the barrels in the forms of cereal and pasta.
On the line for the class with the highest points was a dinner catered by the Evansville Ross staff. The contest ended on Thursday, March 30th with the evening Medical Assistant class bringing trunks full of items to negate any of their competition’s positive point values. After all the counts were done, the Evansville Ross campus was able to donate over four large barrels of food with a total of over 1,800 items!
“We strongly believe in our students seeing the importance of community service. It is also just as important that they know we want to make sure that if a student needs help, they know there are resources out there to obtain help. We will do all that we can do to get them connected with who they need to be connected with to get the help may need,” said Erica Koch, Office Assistant at the Evansville campus.
For more information about the Tri-State Food Bank and how you can get involved, check out their website at www.tristatefoodbank.org.