This spring, the staff of the Ross Medical Education Center in Roosevelt Park, Michigan campus challenged the campus to fill the Campus Director’s office with food during the all campus March food drive. For this year’s drive, the staff, students, and faculty of Ross in Roosevelt Park choose Loaves and Fishes food pantry in the heart of downtown Muskegon to benefit from the collection.
The shelter had asked for things like canned meats, spaghetti sauce, canned fruit, pasta, soups, peanut butter, and other essential items. The Roosevelt Park campus collected several boxes of cake and frosting mixes as well. When Leslie Jolman, Roosevelt Park Campus Director, and Kris Reasoner, Office Assistant, delivered all the food, the shelter volunteers were overjoyed with how much was donated as well as by the variety of items that they had collected. One of the volunteers said, “our clients LOVE seeing cake mixes because it’s not a typical donation and it allows them to make a treat for themselves and their families.”
With the added challenge to fill the office on top of the drive itself, the Roosevelt Park students had fun bringing in their items, logging them, watching the donations get larger, and watching the office space get smaller! During the drive, the campus was able to collect and donate 448 non-perishable food items for the food pantry. “So proud of this campus!” exclaimed Campus Director Leslie Jolman. “The director of the pantry was overjoyed and cannot thank the campus enough for the generous collection of needed goods.”
“The students were very excited and wanting to do a food drive for this charity because it is a local downtown pantry that a lot of students know and use at times,” said Campus Director Leslie Jolman. The Roosevelt Park campus actually challenged the Ross Kentwood campus, and when all of the students and staff found out that the winning campus would receive an ice cream sundae bar, the Roosevelt Park campus really got excited to win! Students were coming in daily, filling the Director’s office, having the front desk record the items and total them everyday, and then asking for the count from Kentwood daily! When they won the contest, they enjoyed the ice cream sundae bar as well.