For our January and February project, we teamed up with Chinmaya Bal Vihar of South Bay for a canned foods drive. The Volunteer Center runs the ‘Food for Kids’ program, that collects non-perishable foods and provides complete weekend meals to children from Title 1 schools and their families. Our goal was to ‘adopt-a-week’ by raising donations for at least 120 bags to be able to feed these children & families for a whole week. Each bag was required to have a specified set of items – breakfast, meals that included healhy protein, rice or pasta, veggies and fruit. Several boxes of canned foods, breakfast cereal etc had been dropped off by generous devotees at the temple over the last month in our drop box. In addition, we created awareness about our project on Maha Shivarathri and raised over $1000 from visiting devotees and our volunteer committee in just over two days. With these funds our team of volunteers purchased the list of foods specified by Volunteer Center. This, along with the donations from BalVihar families enabled us to assemble over 200 bags – well past our goal! On Sunday, February 18, students of Balvihar assembled these bags of food at the temple. This was a great community exercise that also taught children the value of service especially towards those less fortunate than themselves.