Recent Malibu High School graduate Brooke Schwartz organized a club that has provided food for thousands of Southland families.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
A few years ago, Jennifer Gonzalez, English and Film Studies teacher at Malibu High, started offering a new course called Freshman Seminar. The idea was for the students to research a social issue and then create a project that would count for community service.
In June, 12th-grader Brooke Schwartz graduated knowing that the Can-A-Week Club she organized as part of the coursework has collected some 10,000 pounds of food and provided meals for thousands of Southland families.
Gonzalez said that her intent in offering the course was to try and encourage her students to “look outside their home, their community, their state and even their country” for a clearer vision of the world and their privileged place in it.
“High schoolers can be very focused on themselves,” Gonzalez said last month. “The idea was to show them the sense of empowerment that comes from helping others. If you really study a social problem, you look for ways to help solve it and that teaches you critical thinking and organizational skills. Brooke in particular rose to that occasion.”
Gonzalez said Schwartz began with a paper that examined the issue of hunger in Los Angeles. The teenager was appalled to discover the extent of need for basic food in one of the wealthiest communities in the country.
Instead of simply planning a holiday-timed food collection drive, Schwartz founded the Can-A-Week Club and recruited 25 members. Everyone was to supply a new can of food each week and Schwartz would figure out how and where to distribute the goods. She set a goal for the first year of 10,000 cans.
There were logistical issues. Where to store the foodstuff loomed (Gonzalez stored stacks of canned vegetables in her classroom for months). How to get the hundreds of pounds of donations to those who need it was another challenge.
Schwartz contracted with local food banks in L.A. and Ventura County. The Ventura County Food Bank sent a bus to pick up goods. She set up a deal with S.O.S., the project that provides meals to the homeless at Webster Elementary School. They agreed to load up some vans.
Mostly, she kept recruiting new club members, realizing that the project needed to be handed off to another organizer once she graduated.
“It’s hard to motivate kids to do anything, but I had more luck with younger students than high school kids,” Schwartz said. “It’s only one can a week, but high school kids get involved in other stuff and don’t really follow through. I had a lot of success with Mr. Jacob’s students.”
That would be Ari Jacobs, who teaches Middle School Social Studies and coaches baseball. His 7th grade students enthusiastically embraced the Can-A-Week drive and eventually collected so many cans, they stacked them into food “castles” in the classroom, reflecting the course on Medieval Chivalry Jacobs was teaching.
Last year, Schwartz collected 8,000 cans and this year, about the same.
“I found out that about one in 10 people in Los Angeles County go hungry every day,” Schwartz said. “That’s pretty alarming. At first, I thought it was just drug addicts or homeless people. But it’s really more working-class people who can’t afford rent and enough food for the family as well.”
Gonzalez said that her other students had come up with worthy projects, but many devoted to helping communities at a distance.
“One student donated her art work to an auction and raised $800 to send to victims of Katrina,” the teacher said. “Others raised money for animal rights groups or Operation Smile (a nonprofit that funds treatment for facial deformities, like cleft palates, in third-world countries). These are all wonderful, but Brooke particularly wanted to concentrate on communities nearby.”
Gonzalez said she was most pleased to see her students learning that their efforts on a small level can make huge impacts within a community.
“Our motto is to try and give back more than you get,” she said. “There are always avenues to help; even for kids who might come from their own modest circumstances and have trouble bringing in food each week. You just need to find the thing that moves you.”
Schwartz is hoping to hand off the Can-A-Week Club to a “motivated” 9th or 10th grader who will keep the donations coming in. She is heading off to Tufts University in Boston and thinks she might like to continue working in community organizing, much like another famous community organizer currently occupying the White House.
“It would be great if we could get all the kids at the school to participate,” she said. “We could really make an impact then!”