Students organize charity movements
Chick-Fil-A Leadership Academy and six DBHS clubs service local communities in December.
Photo courtesy of Justin Panlilio
Photo courtesy of JUSTIN PANLILIO Walnut High School Key Club advisor Justin Panlilio, along with WHS and DBHS Key Club members, prepare to pack cardboard boxes with donations.
December was a month of good deeds for service clubs at Diamond Bar High School.
Six clubs held donation drives throughout the month, collecting various items to give to veterans, the homeless, foster children and others in need.
Key Club’s canned food drive collected the most donations. Members teamed up with National Honors Society, Red Cross, UNICEF, Interact and Leo Club to collect hundreds of cans.
The DBHS and Walnut High School Key Clubs passed the cans they collected to the Walnut Valley Kiwanis Club, which held a holiday food drive with 100 boxes of fresh produce and more than 2,000 cans.
“We donated a lot to poor, individual families who had signed up to receive food beforehand,” sophomore Emily Chen, who serves as an ambassador for the DBHS Key Club to the other Key Clubs, said. “Many other boxes were donated to local churches, who would then distribute it to their own needy or homeless.”
In addition to helping Key Club with their canned food drive, Red Cross held a Veteran’s Wishlist drive.
The club received 85 donations, which included toiletries, tissues and other daily necessities. Senior Rachel Wang contributed to more than half of the donations in the drive.
“When our school’s Red Cross provided this opportunity to donate items for their Veterans Wishlist, I immediately knew I wanted to do more. I was extremely excited that I had the resources to help,” Wang said. “I ended up donating a total to 50 hotel toiletries, including 30 soaps, 10 shampoos, and 10 conditioners.”
Another student group held its own service projects for an event called “Do Good December.”
The Chick-Fil-A Leader Academy, composed of athletes from all over campus, split into three groups.
Each group decided on and executed their own service project, and one of the three groups held a blanket drive.
They gave the blankets to a church in Downtown Los Angeles to pass out to the homeless.
“We feel that homeless people, especially in LA, need help,” senior Sean Martin said. “Especially in this cold weather.”
These projects were meant to serve as practice for the group’s goal to complete one big service project at the end of the school year, a tradition that Athletic Director Albert Lim hopes to continue in coming years.
“My goal is to… do it every year,” Lim said. “I don’t know if a lot of groups actually executed it or not, but it’s a good reflection for them leading up to their final service project. A lot of their obstacles were that they were thinking way too big.”
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