HFCA's kNOw Hunger Campaign Builds Learning and Community

Holy Family Catholic Academy, an International Baccalaureate World School (IB), is globally recognized for engaging learners with relevant, real-world experiences that impact local, national, and international communities. Recently, while looking to impact the larger community, it was in fact, HFCA's own supportive community that led to the success of the Inverness school's annual kNOw Hunger Food Drive.

The food drive is aptly named kNOw Hunger because all students in preschool through middle school learned about the many issues that contribute to hunger in the Northwest suburbs. Lisa Arthur, an HFCA third grade teacher who has taught in IB schools internationally, summarizes the schoolwide effort by saying, "Our kNOw Hunger Campaign is a wonderful example of how the IB framework uses a multidisciplinary approach to learning and clearly complements the Catholic values that call all of us to make a difference no matter our age."

HFCA teachers collaborated with the Academy's IB Facilitator, Katie Bird, to find innovative ways to expand their respective IB units to incorporate age-appropriate material to raise awareness about hunger. This study encompassed subjects including language arts, science, economics, and even math. HFCA accomplished this learning by also leveraging its own community of classrooms, multi-grade neighborhoods, Student Council, and supportive parents to encourage each other to succeed.

First grade teachers Jen Lando and Laura Moynihan challenged their students to learn how our suburban community helps others. Lando explained how IB's multidisciplinary framework expanded the learning of HFCA first-graders, "Our students read books about hunger, created a map of our community including the food pantry, earned money doing household chores, went shopping with their parents, and counted and sorted the food as it was donated daily. We worked with our 7th grade buddies to create graphs to show how our donations were growing, and remarkably, the students' curiosity led us to use 3-digit addition to quantify the donations."

The learning also moved from individual classrooms to working with multi-grade neighborhoods to sharing knowledge throughout the school. Students from kindergarten through 8th grade spoke at an all-school Mass explaining what they learned, raising awareness of the issues, encouraging everyone to participate in the food drive, and of course, praying for those in need.

The learning was supported by HFCA families. States Jackie Settimi, parent of Massimo (2nd grade) and Eva (1st grade), "I loved how our kids came home from school looking for ways to earn money to buy food for clients of the food pantry. Rather than asking me to pull together the donation, they owned the process using their own money, shopping for food, and feeling empowered to help others."

The school collected over 4,100 items which were packed and transported by a caravan of families to the All Saints Food Pantry at the Partners for Our Communities (POC) in Palatine which serves over 300 families weekly.

Grace McKian, a 5th grade student succinctly summarized HFCA's kNOw Hunger Campaign after seeing the mountain of food and the total community effort involved, "Wow, we sure can accomplish a lot when we all work together!"

Communities supporting communities.