In the past, Stone Ridge’s involvement with SOME snack packs has dipped and waned. However, this year, it’s back with a vengeance!
SOME is an organization located in the district that helps provide healthcare, housing, food and other forms of help to the homeless and low income residents of Washington DC. It is an interfaith organization that was started by Father McKenna opening a Soup Kitchen in the basement of St. Aloysius church. SOME began providing additional services when the people who ran it realized how much more good they could do by providing programs to help the whole person such as housing and substance abuse counseling. Their motto is “Restoring hope and dignity one person at a time” and they try to do that by rehabilitating their clientele holistically, meaning that they try to help them not just by giving them food, clothing, and a place to stay, but also by advocating for the homeless and low income and empowering the people that they serve
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Stone Ridge’s personal involvement with SOME in recent years has not been restricted to sending girls to both the official SOME organization and the Father McKenna center (insert link 3), but also involves our participation with the snack pack program. The snack pack program consists of girls bringing in fruit, granola bars, and healthy cookies to advisory the day before social action and putting one of each into brown paper bags. The next day, the snack packs are all transported to SOME and distributed to clients so that they can be taken to work or school or eaten as healthy midday snacks. Our involvement in this program helps bring Stone Ridge Girls together in their service of the community and helps us bring the heart of Christ into the world.
Unfortunately, in the past years participation by advisory groups has waned. Since many students can not drive themselves and are not in charge of household groceries, it is difficult to go out and get bags of apples or boxes of granola bars and oatmeal raisin cookies unless they plan far enough ahead for their parent or guardian to buy them extra. However, Anna Primosch, through various tactics has managed to reawaken enthusiasm for this noble program. She has instated a competition through the advisories to see who could prepare the most snack packs to incentivize the students to participate. Ms. Fontanone’s advisory won, with 40 snack packs under their belt! During the first half of the first semester, the students made over 500 snack packs! Anna Primosch says, “I never expected us to make 582 snack packs in the first quarter alone, especially when we only had two Snack Pack Tuesdays to make them! It’s incredible to see the whole Upper School community come together for a common cause”
Hopefully, we can keep up the good work!
