Every year, Los Altos High School holds a two-week long food drive to collect food to send to Second Harvest Food Bank. The most the school has collected in past drives is 15,000 pounds of food. This year, the students, led by the Associated Student Body class and their LA 30K group, have their sights on doubling the record – collecting 30,000 pounds of food.

In past years, students have brought in single cans of food from home. But the drive’s organizers decided this year to try a different approach.

They are asking every family in the community to donate $5, $10 or $20 – whatever they can afford. The students have set up collection containers around the school campus, have promoted the drive with posters and have called each school family to tell them about the food and fund drive. The money collected will be used to buy bulk food that will be turned over to the Food Bank.

The students researched the plan before deciding to change the format of the drive. Realizing that they can get about six times the amount of food by buying in bulk they settled on adding a fund drive component to their annual project.

The students plan to build a food mountain in the school’s cafeteria so that every student on campus can experience the reality of what it means to donate 80,000 meals, which the 30,000 pounds of food would produce.

Sounds like Los Altos is having a little fun while making a big impact!