After two weeks of intense social media campaigning, WJ’s Kids Helping Kids Food and Funds Drive annual canned food drive has come to an end after collecting a total of 1,630 cans. The school’s goal was to raise 1,500 cans, but the drive actually exceeded expectations thanks to incentives that motivated students to reach various benchmark. The cans will be donated to the Manna Food Center located in Gaithersburg, to benefit the poor.

According to their website, the organization, founded in 1983, “strives to eliminate hunger in Montgomery County through food distribution, education and advocacy,” and is involved with countless local organizations to provide for needy families.  Manna feeds approximately 3,300 families throughout the county each year, providing them with up to five days of perishable and non-perishable foods, once every 30 days. The nonprofit also distributes food to local agencies like soup kitchens, food pantries, group homes and emergency shelters throughout the county, and through the Smart Stacks program, provides kid-friendly food to underprivileged elementary school students every Friday. This program makes sure kids get enough to eat over the weekend, when they cannot rely on free or reduced price school meals.

“Our goal this year is to collect one million pounds of food to feed hungry Marylanders,” said the Maryland State Department of Education on their Kids Helping Kids Food & Funds Drive.

The success of the drive was due to extensive promotions from the leadership class who had been tweeting about cans non-stop for the last few weeks. The tweeting about the drive was a nightly homework assignment for students in Leadership. Students began tweeting common movie names with “can” inserted into the title to remind others about the drive and keep students interested.

“AnchorCAN,” tweeted @Vodka_Lucass, “BatCAN: the dark knight.”

“Message in a CAN,” tweeted @kreppin and “She’s the CAN” tweeted @N0TmarG0T.

A promotional video on the announcements attempting to explain the purpose of the cans, and what would happen to them after they were donated also helped inform students of the drive, and encourage them to participate.

“[In previous years] I had no idea what the purpose of the can food drive was” said one of the food drive’s organizers, senior Anna Rowthorn-Apel. “So this year I wanted to show the students exactly what happens when a can is donated.”

“[Some students from Leadership] went and actually filmed at [the] Manna Food Center [to make the video],” said another organizer, senior Kendall Repetti. They got a tour of the entire process and also learned about various programs that Manna is involved in.

According to Rowthorn-Apel, when donated cans arrive at the food center, they are sorted by weight and type of food. This process makes it a lot easier to package and ship the cans to soup kitchens, homeless shelters and other local organizations.

Going to the Manna Food Center was an eye-opening experience according to several of the organizers.

“It was not anything like I was expecting,” said Rowthorn-Apel of the Manna Food Center. “It’s so much more down to earth and less industrial than I thought it would be. All the volunteers are so sweet and are there doing something they love and 100 percent by choice. Its a really nice thing to be exposed to and it made me even more excited about the can food drive.”

The various benchmarks, ranging from Anatomy teacher, Jamie Grimes wearing a dress for a day, to different groups of teachers making embarrassing music videos, were also widely advertised as humorous rewards meant to motivate students to donate cans. One school favorite seemed to be at the 500 can benchmark, during which Forensics teacher Tom Rogers dressed as an 80’s workout girl. He sported  leg warmers, blue eye shadow and a shiny black wig while he taught his classes throughout the day.

“I make a hideous woman,” said Rogers, “but we got a lot of food. It was awesome.”

Though the drive is over, incentives for reaching benchmarks still have yet to be carried out such as various music videos starring members of the history and English departments.

“What I am most looking forward to is the ‘Single Ladies’ video,” said Rogers, in which teacher’s Chris Murray, Nico Atencio, Rainer Kulenkampff and Jeremy Butler will perform Beyonce’s hit song. This video will be coming soon, as will another video starring English teachers Joanne Reynolds, Sylvie Ellen and Rachel Gold who will perform an interpretation of “Ice Ice Baby“ by Vanilla Ice.

Reynolds promises that the video will be a hit, though originally she was reluctant to participate.

“I didn’t want to make Ms. Ellen and Ms. Gold look bad,” said Reynolds. In the end though, her wish to help others won over. Reynolds said she knew all along that the students would meet their goal. “I have complete faith in the student body to rise to the occasion and help others in this land of ours, USA! USA!” said Reynolds.

This year’s canned food drive was a huge success compared to last year, when the leadership class only raised several hundred cans. The reason: Last year’s drive lacked such intense campaigning and clear cut incentives.

“Last year, all [the leadership class] did was stick boxes in peoples’ classes,” said Repetti. “They didn’t advertise or provide incentives.” As a result, she said, students just weren’t informed or motivated to participate.

This year though, the leadership committee was determined to make it a well-known event. In addition to the teacher incentives and social media promotions, they displayed all of the cans collected each day in the art display case. This was meant to motivate students and show them all of the progress they were making each day.

“A lot of kids say it’s a hassle to bring in cans,” Repetti said. “We wanted to overcome the hassle.”

All of their efforts paid off in the end, thanks to many students bringing in just a few cans each. There were some major contributors as well. Repetti brought in 45 cans herself, and a few other leadership class members brought in similarly large numbers. Spanish teacher, Esther Onto also brought in a pack of about 100 cans from Costco.

“She had a whole cart [full of cans] that we had to wheel in,” said Repetti.

Thanks to all of the hard work put in by the leadership class, especially the organizers, as well as students and teachers around the school who brought in cans, the drive was a huge success.

“I think we put more time and energy into a project which has been previously regarded as a tedious mandatory project,” said Rowthorn-Apel. “We actually had fun with it and made it our sole goal to really make a difference in the way the project is run.”

Hopefully this year’s accomplishment will act as a precedent for future successes.