Every month in Canada, over 850,000 Canadian citizens require the services of food banks in order to stave off hunger.
Locally, the Yorkton Soup Haven feeds, on average, 250 school children per day.
The latter is the inspiration for the M.C. Knoll Knights’ ‘Hoops for Hunger’ campaign; a campaign launched earlier this month by the M.C. Knoll Knights basketball program, which is designed to help feed those children that may not otherwise be able to afford proper meals. “What we’re doing is, we’re going to have donations being collected here at M.C. Knoll by the basketball team and in the commons area,” said M.C. Knoll Phys. Ed teach and Knights coach Mark Schendel, continuing, “We’re going to be collecting things like juice boxes, fruit cups, peanut free cereals, and of course we’re going to be donating those food products to the Soup Haven which will be using them for the lunches.”
The Knights aren’t going to stop at just donating the food, however.
Schendel says that in addition to the donations, the members of the Knights basketball program – over 60 elementary school students grade six to eight – will also be making their way to the Soup Haven and preparing the lunches themselves. “We’re going to be going on-site and putting together the lunches.
“We’re not going to be making the sandwiches, but we’re going to put together the meals in the bags and do the rest of the lunch prepping.”
The Knights will also be periodically blitzing their local area with flyers and brochures given to them by the Soup Haven. “Hopefully we’ll create some more awareness for the cause in our community and get people to donate their time or some food to the Soup Haven,” noted Schendel, adding that the Knights will be wearing black ‘Hoops for Hunger’ t-shirts during their warmups all season long with the hope of creating even more awareness for their campaign.
The ‘Hoops for Hunger’ campaign isn’t the first time that the M.C. Knoll Knights basketball teams have come together for a good cause. In the past the Knights raised seven-hundred dollars for Telemiracle and the Yorkton SPCA and three-thousand dollars for breast cancer research.
They’ve also previously joined forces with former NFLer Steve Gleason to raise money and awareness for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and most recently teamed up with the Canadian Diabetes Association.
