The 23 students of Hood View Junior Academy’s (HVJA) junior high Bible class were determined to participate in the tsunami-relief process and decided to develop their own fundraiser.
We didn’t have the power to organize a nation-wide charity and we didn’t have the expertise to arrange a call-in network. So it simply became a matter of finding areas in our own lives where we could cut back our expenditures. We decided that taking junk food out of our diets for two weeks would be a small sacrifice to make in order to help the people whose lives had been destroyed by the tsunami. We called it the Junk-Free Spree.
Students and local church members were asked to forgo junk food for two weeks Feb. 6–20. Junk food included cookies, popcorn, ice cream, pop and candy bars. During this period, they were asked to bring in money saved by not buying junk food and put it in one of our many collection cans. All proceeds would go to ADRA.
Each class member was assigned a task, and in about a week and a half, our Junk-Free Spree was up and running.
Valentine's Day fell within the two-week time period, requiring us to be more creative than usual. We managed to have a fun, junk-free Valentine’s Day by eating veggies cut in heart shapes and a Friendship Fruit Salad!
Our fundraiser was a huge success! We raised $2,150 for tsunami relief.
The Junk-Free Spree has sparked many benefits, including better personal health and especially the reward of knowing we did something good for someone else. All in all, an occasional yearning for chocolate aside, we think our small sacrifice was totally worth it!
HVJA seventh-graders Reice Bennett, Alex Nusbaum and Spencer Tonack present a check for $2,150 to Marilyn Renk, Oregon Conference Community Services and disaster response director, representing ADRA. (Amy L. Schrader)
